Six Billion Dollar Experiment

In the coming months the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe. Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2008, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV.

The LHC is the next step in a voyage of discovery which began a century ago. Back then, scientists had just discovered all kinds of mysterious rays, X-rays, cathode rays, alpha and beta rays. Where did they come from? Were they all made of the same thing, and if so what? These questions have now been answered, giving us a much greater understanding of the Universe. Along the way, the answers have changed our daily lives, giving us televisions, transistors, medical imaging devices and computers. On the threshold of the 21st century, we face new questions which the LHC is designed to address. Who can tell what new developments the answers may bring?

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. It sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. CERN is a laboratory where scientists unite to study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible. Founded in 1954, the laboratory was one of Europe's first joint ventures and includes now 20 Member States.

(Taken from: BBC and the Cern Website.)

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