A massive experiment plans to investigate how the universe began

The tunnel buried under Geneva isn’t just a tunnel, it’s the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and with it scientists hope to recreate the searingly hot conditions that occurred just after the big bang.

The LHC (which is about the same length as the London Underground Circle Line) contains two parallel tubes through which high energy particles called protons will travel in opposite directions. The particles will be accelerated to close to the speed of light by some of the strongest magnets on Earth and at points in the tunnel called detectors, the two parallel tubes cross causing the high energy protons to crash into each other.

By studying what is left behind after the protons have collided, scientists hope to discover how the big bang created matter. Everything in the universe – people, water, stars, hamsters, brussels sprouts – is made up of matter and by studying where this matter comes from, scientists can start to answer the questions ‘where do we come from?’ and ‘what are we made of’?

Some particles of matter were last seen a billionth of a second after the big bang when the universe expanded and cooled, meaning that the particles that were present joined together and gradually formed the matter that we see around us today. By smashing protons together in the massive LHC, scientists can look for the particles which were present just after the big bang and study their behaviour to find out why the universe is made the way it is.

One of the particles that they expect to find is the Higgs Boson, which is believed to be key to why other particles have mass. It might seem obvious that everything we see around us has a mass but even though it is such a commonly experienced property of matter, we don’t clearly understand how it is formed.

Theory says that the Higgs Boson particle interacts with other particles to give them mass - the more a particle interacts with the Higgs Boson, the more mass it will have -  but so far the Higgs Boson hasn't been found in any experiment conducted so far. 

Unfortunately, the CERN laboratory won’t be up and running until 2007, so we have a while to wait until we know not only whether the Higgs Boson exists but how it behaves and whether it is to blame for mass.  

Links

Play the CERN LHC game – speed up and direct protons by magnets and then watch as they collide.

Explore the CERN laboratory and watch the film ‘Lords of the Ring’ explaining the technology behind the Large Hadron Collider (right hand side of linked page).

Catch a live world wide webcast 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity.... and Beyond' launching from CERN on 1st Dec 2005. Submit questions during discussions with Nobel prize winners and famous scientists, and take a virtual tour of CERN.