LHC at Cern powers-up successfully

The worlds largest ever physics experiment - designed to probe the very existence of all the matter in the universe has been successfully started.

The switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Cern laboratory in Geneva is a major step in furthering our understanding of the universe around us. The particle accelerator, built at a cost of £4.4 billion, has been designed to recreate what happened at the birth of the Universe.

They have fired a beam of protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the LHC. The beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. “There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. Later adding: “We had a very good start-up.”

The day has gone much smoother than experts predicted. Professor Brian Cox said: “The beam circulated the LHC 3 times on the first attempt at just before 10.28 CET (0928 BST). The senior guys here do look genuinely surprised at the performance of their 27km baby. To put it into context, I was told earlier that the last machine here, LEP, which was much simpler, took 12 hours to get to this point. LHC has delivered the goods in an hour!”

At 10.31 BST the first beam event was witnessed in the ATLAS detector – one of 4 detectors along the 27km-long ring. It is expected that at some point today the opposite beam will be started up - the team at Cern didn’t expect to reach this point so early in the initiation process of the experiment.

The vast circular tunnel - the "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. The magnets are there to steer the beam - made up of particles called protons - around this 27km-long ring. Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second. At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events. Among the debris thrown off by these collisions, scientists hope they will find the elusive Higgs-Boson, which is thought to be responsible for giving every other particle its mass, or weight. But scientists admit it could be years before they start producing any meaningful results due to the challenges involved in detecting such tiny and fleeting particles.

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society said: "Science demands experimentation and some scientific challenges are so great that they demand a massive enterprise, in which thousands of researchers combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.

 "This happened in astronomy with the Hubble Telescope, and in biology with the human genome project.  And now it is happening in Physics. The Large Hadron Collider, which begins operations today, will be the largest experiment in human history."