After a quarter of a century of dreaming and planning, designing and building, at last we are about to see the world’s largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator (LHC) in action – on 10th September 2008.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic (27-kilometre) scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle acceleratorused by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the miniscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

Read more at the following source links:

CERN – LHC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
CERN announces start-up date for LHC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/08/lhc_preps_to_open_fire/