Animation of the tracks of particles produced in a collision, such as would be found in the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN. Colliders accelerate particles to extremely high energies before letting them smash into each other. At certain very high energies this process can produce showers of other particles, including fundamental particles. Studying the behaviour and decay products of the new particles can give insight into the nature of matter and spacetime itself. Since 2010, the LHC has been colliding protons to attempt to detect a Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that is the quantum of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is postulated to give mass to some particles when the symmetry of the electroweak force, which is one force at high energies, is broken into electromagnetism and the weak interaction. These are carried by massless photons and massive W and Z bosons respectively.