Smash hit
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's biggest and most-powerful particle accelerator - is supposed to give scientists insights into the Big Bang.
Built inside a 27km tunnel, about 100 metres underneath the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC (right) - known as the 'giant fridge' because of its extreme sub-zero temperatures - was developed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as Cern. Robert Aymar, the director-general at Cern, says the LHC's research programme 'has the potential to change our view of the universe'.
The machine contains two adjacent parallel pipes, in which beams of protons - finer than a human hair - race in opposite directions at more than 99 per cent the speed of light. The data recorded during the inevitable collisions should start to yield results in about 12 months.
The first beams were circulated through the LHC on September 10. The initial high-energy collisions were slated for the collider's official unveiling on October 21, but that may not happen now; operations have been suspended because of equipment failure. Scientists intend to create almost 1 billion collisions per second at discrete intervals around the machine.
About 7,000 scientists from 80 countries are expected to have access to the accelerator's experiments.
What happens in the collisions will be identified and measured by six detectors, one of which is called Atlas, the world's largest general-purpose particle detector. Atlas is 46 metres long and 25 metres in diameter. It weighs 7,000 tonnes and consists of 100 million sensors. The Atlas experiments will allow physicists to take a big leap on a journey that started with Isaac Newton's description of gravity. Gravity is ubiquitous since it acts on mass, but so far science has been unable to explain why particles have specific types of mass.
'One might think the biggest challenge was to build the detector itself - it has been likened to building a ship in a bottle,' says Atlas scientist James Proudfoot. But, he says, that task 'pales in significance when compared to the challenge in bringing into operation some 100 million electronics channels, to function with high reliability and precision and provide the signals from which physicists will interpret the collisions occurring at the Large Hadron Collider'.
Hopefully, scientific data from the smoking wreckage of protons will reveal a mysterious entity called the Higgs boson.
Called 'the Holy Grail of physics' and 'the God particle', the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle that apparently pervades all of space and would help explain how massless particles cause matter to have mass. No experiment has yet directly detected its existence.
Cern's massive, two-decades- in-the-making atom-smasher will consequently spur physicists worldwide to revise, even rip up, their incredibly intricate rulebook on quantum mechanics.
