PROJECT'S IMPACT:The collider will provide information that until now has remained outside our grasp, according to the head of a research group working on it.
"It has the facility to explain things we have never been able to see before," said Prof Phil Allport, head of particle physics at the University of Liverpool and the head of the group which is involved in two key experiments attached to the LHC. "We are really entering a golden era of particle physics."
His excitement and that of the physics world generally relates to the uniqueness of the new collider at Cern. It will smash atoms together to create energies and temperatures not seen since moments after the Big Bang that created the universe and space-time about 14 billion years ago.
It will accomplish this by sending two groups of protons, hydrogen atoms stripped of their atoms, around the LHC's 27km long ring at almost the speed of light. Each beam will be seven times more energetic than the highest collider energies currently achieved, and when the protons collide their energy combines to 14 times the standing record.
The energy released will create temperatures much hotter than the interior of the sun and will shatter the protons into the even smaller particles of which they are made.
Scientists eagerly await the discovery of a particular particle from these collisions, the Higgs boson.
The Higgs has only been proposed in theory, but is a crucial part of the standard model used by physics to explain matter. We have never seen it because we can't produce the collider energies needed to free it. Until now.
The LHC will produce more than enough energy to deliver the Higgs boson, provided it actually exists.
