The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, built by CERN between 1998 and 2008. It was constructed by scientists and engineers from over 100 countries and is used to collide beams of hadrons like protons and lead ions at very high energies to study the fundamental structure of the universe and laws of physics. Analysis of the collision byproducts provides evidence about subatomic particle structure and the forces governing the natural world.