World's largest physics experiment 'Big Bang' starts well

Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang, said BBC News. brThey have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). brThe £5.0bn ($9.0 billion) machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash particles together with cataclysmic force. brScientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics. brThe first beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 British nStandard Time (1430 Bangladesh Standard Time) BST. The second successfully circled the ring after 1400 BST (1900 Bangladesh Strandard Time). brCern has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions, but these are expected to happen before the machine shuts down for winter. brWe will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang Dr Tara Shears, University of Liverpool What is the Large Hadron Collider;brThere it is, project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. There were cheers in the control room when engineers heard of the successful test. brHe added later We had a very good start-up. brThe LHC is arguably the most complicated and ambitious experiment ever built; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late. brThe collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern. brThe vast circular tunnel - the ring - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. brThe magnets are there to steer the beam - made up of particles called protons - around this 27km-long ring. brBig Bang Day Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second. brAt allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive detectors that monitor the collisions for interesting events. brScientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos. brMajor effort We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before, said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool. brWe will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic. brThe LHC should answer one very simple question What is mass LHC DETECTORS brATLAS - one of two so-called general purpose detectors -- will be used to look for signs of new physics, including the origins of mass and extra dimensionsbrCMS - the second general purpose detector will, like ATLAS, hunt for the Higgs boson and look for clues to the nature of dark matterbrALICE - will study a liquid form of matter called quark-gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang.brLHCb - Equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang. LHCb will try to investigate what happened to the missing anti-matter brWe know the answer will be found at the LHC, said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London. brThe currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the God Particle. According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs. brThe latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4.0% of the Universe. brThe rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious stuff. brBut Professor Virdee told BBC News Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us. brFull beam ahead Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring. brTechnicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems. brSteve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, said There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets. brIf there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit. brSuperconducting magnets are cooled down using liquid helium. Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage. brThe culprits - who were drinking a particular brand that advertising once claimed would refresh the parts other beers cannot reach - were never found. brAfter the beams make one turn, engineers attempt to close the orbit, allowing the beams to circulate continuously around the LHC. brReuters adds from Geneva International scientists celebrated the successful start of a huge particle-smashing machine on Wednesday aiming to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe.brExperiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest and most complex machine ever made, could revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.brThe project has had to work hard to deny suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.brSuch fears, fanned by doomsday writers, have spurred huge interest in particle physics before the machine's start-up. Leading scientists have dismissed such concerns as nonsense.brThe debut of the machine that cost 10 billion Swiss francs ($9 billion) registered as a blip on a control room screen at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, at about 930 a.m. (330 a.m. EDT).brWe've got a beam on the LHC, project leader Lyn Evans told his colleagues, who burst into applause at the news.brThe physicists and technicians huddled in the control room cheered loudly again an hour later when the particle beam completed a clockwise trajectory of the accelerator, successfully completing the machine's first major task.brEventually, the scientists want to send beams in both directions to create tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light, an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, a concept of the origin of the universe that dominates scientific thinking.brThe Big Bang is thought to have occurred 15 billion years ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in a void, spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.brSlight Hiccup Problems with the LHC's magnets caused its temperature -- which is kept at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit) -- to fluctuate slightly, delaying efforts to send a particle beam in the counter-clockwise direction. The beam started its progression and then was halted.brThis is a hiccup, not a major thing, Rudiger Schmidt, CERN's head of hardware commissioning, told reporters, adding the second rotation should be completed on Wednesday afternoon.br