The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has successfully concluded its proton smashing for 2010.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, wrapped up its 2010 run this morning. The LHC smashed particles together at 7TeV, about seven times what its closest rival, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, can achieve.

But power doesn’t tell the whole story: particle accelerators are like flashlights, the brighter they are, the more you can see. Brightness, in this case, corresponds to the number of collisions, and here the LHC has been a little less impressive. Over the course of the run (which started in late March), the collider has produced just 50 inverse picobarns worth of data. The units of particle physics are quite confusing, but this is about what the Tevatron can do in a week.

So will the LHC’s detectors spot anything in this first data? Maybe. If there is some really unusual new particle at energies between 1 and 7TeV, then it should stick out like a sore thumb. But if there’s a subtler effect, then the LHC will have to gather more data in future runs before it can say anything definitive. The next few months will be spent sifting through the fresh data in the hopes of seeing something new.

The good news is that future runs should produce more data more quickly. The LHC reached its targets for “brightness”, or luminosity, in mid October, and then quickly surpassed them. The experiment gathered more data in the past few days than it had the rest of the year. And next year, the scientists hope to gather around 20 times the data they gathered this year.

The proton experiments may take a break, but the LHC won’t, for now anyway. It’s now preparing to collide lead ions for further studies. Those experiments will replicate conditions shortly after the Big Bang, and should tell scientists more about the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together inside the nuclei of atoms.

Credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN