Collider to Begin Science Quest

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to start the work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics, reports BBC News.

Scientists working on the European machine will later attempt to smash beams of proton particles together at unprecedented energies. The seven-trillion-electronvolt (TeV) collisions will initiate 18-24 months of intensive investigations at the LHC.

Scientists hope the study will bring novel insights into the nature of the cosmos and how it came into being. But they caution that the data gathered from the sub-atomic impacts will take time to evaluate, and the public should not expect immediate results.

"Major discoveries will happen only when we are able to collect billions of events and identify among them the very rare events that could present a new state of matter or new particles," said Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the CMS detector at the LHC.
"This is not going to happen tomorrow. It will require months and years of patient work," he said.
The LHC is one of the biggest scientific endeavors ever undertaken.

Housed in a 27km-long tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the LHC will collide particles travelling at close to the speed of light. The expectation is that previously unseen phenomena will reveal themselves in the debris. A key objective is to find the much talked-about Higgs boson particle.

This is thought to have a profound role to play in the structure of the Universe, and would enable scientists to explain why matter has mass - something which, at a fundamental level, they have difficulty doing at present.