Image courtesy CERN

Questions that have been at the back of our minds since the dawn of time, such as; ‘how did the universe begin?’ are now a step closer to being answered. On the 10^th of September 2008, the first beam was fired through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A beam of charged particles was accelerated up to 99.9% of the speed of light and bent around the 27 kilometer (16.77mile) track using powerful magnets to keep it on course.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been preparing for this moment for over two decades, and it marks a historic moment in the search for scientific understanding of the universe. The project has caught the imagination of people all around the world.

“It’s a fantastic moment,” LHC project leader Lyn Evans told the press, “we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Reaching this stage however was no mean feat. Thousands of individual elements had to be built and installed at a depth of between 50 and 100 meters below ground between the Jura mountain range in France and Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The ring that forms the LHC is composed of 1,232 dipole magnets designed to keep the beams on their path around the circuit. An additional 392 quadrupole magnets focus the beam to maximize the chances of collisions between the particles in the four intersection points.

The initial successful run is only the beginning. As the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence, the new machine’s acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be collided together allowing the research program to begin properly. CERN is no stranger to such experiments. They have already conducted thousands of experiments using the LHC’s little brother, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). The SPS was officially commissioned on the 17th of June 1976 and after decades of research is now a vital component of the LHC, used to drive particles up to speed and inject them into the main loop.

After around a year of calibration, the LHC’s four major experiments will start up and new data will start to flood in. It is estimated that each year the LHC will bring in enough data to fill a stack of CDs 20km high. Among the experiments that will take place at the LHC include 4 main experiments. LHCb is the search for Anti-Matter; Atlas is the search for dark matter; Alice attempts to probe the moments after the Big Bang; and CMS is the search to find the elusive Higgs boson (a theoretical particle, which if it exists is responsible for giving objects their mass and for interactions involving gravity).

Other theorized particles, models and states that may be produced by the LHC include supersymmetric particles, microscopic black holes, technicolour theories, extra dimensions, strangelets, and magnetic monopoles.

Atlas will try to uncover the mysteries behind dark matter, which is suspected to compose 25% of the matter in the universe. Though dark matter cannot be seen in telescopes because it does not reflect heat or light, its existence is inferred because it does have mass and hence interacts with stars and galaxies. LHCb will try to answer the question; why was there more matter than antimatter at the beginning of the universe? Alice attempts to recreate the conditions that were present at the beginning of the universe in order to better understand how the universe came about.

“The LHC is a discovery machine,” CERN Director General Robert Aymar told the press, “its research program has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself.”