A team of scientists in Switzerland have collided sub-atomic particles at record power, in an attempt to mimic conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
"This is a major breakthrough. We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics," Oliver Buchmueller at the the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), said.
The experiment in Cern's 27km long Large Hadron Collider (Lhc) will allow researchers to examine the nature of fundamental matter and the origins of stars and planets.
The collisions took place at a record total collision energy of 7 billion electron volt, just a fraction of a second slower than the speed of light.
"This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we have collisions at 7 TeV [teralectronvolts]," Paola Catapano, a scientist at the centre in Geneva, said on Tuesday.
'God particle'
The success came after the experiment was delayed for a few hours by technical glitches with power supply.
But the third attempt triggered collisions among the 20 billion protons in the Lhc, which runs about 100 metres below the Swiss-French border.
"We're within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang," James Gillies, a Cern spokesman, told the AFP news agency.
Cheers and applause erupted in separate control rooms around the huge ring as the detectors recorded the collisions of sub atomic particles on computer screen graphs.
Steve Myers, Cerns' director for accelerators and technology, said they planned to repeat the experiment several times over the coming week and hundreds of times over the year.
As the tests continue scientists around the world will sift through and process the data on a giant computer network, searching for evidence of a theorised missing link called the Higgs Boson, also known as the "God Particle".
Despiona Hatzifotiadu, a Cern scientist, said the experiment would "give us a clue of how we were created in the beginning.
It also aims to shed light on "dark matter" and subsequently "dark energy", invisible matter or forces that are thought to account together for some 96 per cent of the cosmos.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/03/201033012213217329.html
