The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and considered "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind". It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, and particularly prove or disprove the existence of the theorized Higgs boson[2] and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.[3] The LHC is expected to address some of the still unsolved questions of physics, advancing human understanding of physical laws. It contains six detectors each designed for specific kinds of exploration.