The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under construction in a man-made doughnut-shaped cavern under the Franco-Swiss border, outside Geneva, is nearing completion. It will shortly be time for its associated software and grid computing architecture to prove their mettle.
South African engineers and IT researchers are involved with the grid computing aspects of the project.
The final element of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector was lowered into the cavern earlier this week. Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, plan to start up the LHC by mid-year. CERN is considered the world's leading laboratory for particle physics.
Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to take a big leap on a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity is ubiquitous since it acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain why particles have the masses they have.
Experiments such as CMS may provide the answer. LHC experiments will also probe the mysterious missing mass and dark energy of the universe, they will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, probe matter as it existed close to the beginning of time and look for extra dimensions of space-time.
"This is a very exciting time for physics," says CMS spokesman Tejinder Virdee. "The LHC is poised to take us to a new level of understanding of our universe."
"[The] CMS is unique in the way that the detector was constructed in very large elements in a surface assembly building and then lowered underground," says CMS technical co-ordinator Austin Ball. "This is likely to become a model for future experiments, as the technique can now be considered proven."
CERN is famously the home of the World Wide Web, the most common and widely used Internet application.
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