The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, is a step closer to answering some fundamental questions physicists and others have about the universe and the nature of matter.
CERN engineers yesterday reticulated a proton beam along the full 27km length of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, for the first time.
"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."
Evans says scientists will now spend time fine-tuning the LHC, previously described as the world's largest physics experiment. The huge machine bristles with detectors and other measuring devices all linked via a service-oriented architecture to a control centre and by means of a grid to physics laboratories worldwide where the petabytes of data gathered will be analysed.
"[...] timings have to be synchronised to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision," he adds.
Yesterday's success "puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and 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."
Searching for answers
He adds that 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.
CERN briefing notes add the LHC experiment 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," says CERN.
LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe - visible matter seems to account for just 5% 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."
SA is not formally involved in the programme, although a number of local computer scientists and physicists have contributed to the development of the LHC and the grid computing net that will carry the data collected.
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