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History's greatest scientific experiment to produce elusive 'God particle' underway

Geneva, September 10 ANI: The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN was successfully steered today morning around the full 27 kilometers of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, which is located on the border of France and Switzerland."It's a fantastic moment," said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe," he added.The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.Over the next few weeks, as the LHC's operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine's acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.Once colliding beams have been established, there will be a period of measurement and calibration for the LHC's four major experiments, and new results could start to appear in around a year. Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, which is also refrred to as the 'God particle, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe - visible matter seems to account for just 5 per cent of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time."The LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "Its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that's as old as mankind itself," he added.According to Pier Oddone, Director of the US Fermilab, "The completion of the LHC marks the start of a revolution in particle physics." The first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October 2008. ANI