Scientists launched "Big Bang" experiment successfully

The world’s largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 27-km tunnel on Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.“There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

The startup was eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.“Well done everybody,” said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border.

The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland's national exhibition, Expo'02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

The organisation, known by its French acronym CERN, fired the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages, several kilometers at a time.Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.

Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC's proton beams collide. (Roy Langstaff, © CERN)

The startup — awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.The skeptics theorised that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars. “It’s nonsense,” said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday’s start.

The ALICE Inner Tracking System during its transport in the experimental cavern and its insertion into the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN) will study the physics of ultrahigh-energy proton-proton and lead-lead collisions and will explore conditions in the first instants of the universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain’s Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.Gillies said that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.And full power is probably a year away. “On Wednesday we start small,” said Gillies. “A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you’ve got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show-stopper.” The LHC, as the collider is known, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

Insertion of the tracker in the heart of the CMS detector. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

The project organised by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country which contributed $531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.The CERN experiments could reveal more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The LHCb electromagnetic calorimeter. This huge 6X7 square meter wall consists of 3300 blocks containing scintillator, fibre optics and lead. It will measure the energy of particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC when it is started. Photons, electrons and positrons will pass through the layers of material in these modules and deposit their energy in the detector through a shower of particles. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

The Z+ end of the CMS Tracker with Tracker Outer Barrel completed. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

View of the CMS detector at the end of 2007. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)