CERN: Creating big bang on earth

The European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. The organization has twenty European member states, and is currently the workplace of approximately 2600 full-time employees, as well as some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities).

"CERN" originally stood for "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire" (which is french for "European Council for Nuclear Research"). The name was changed into European Organization for Nuclear Research shortly after it was founded, nevertheless the "CERN" abbreviation was kept as it had been widely accepted.

Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature. The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

CERN’s scientific-research facilities—representing the world’s largest machines called Large Hadron Coliider (LHC), particle accelerators, dedicated to studying the universe’s smallest objects, subatomic.

What is Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC

What is the aim of LHC?
The aim of the 4.4 billion-pound (over $7.7 billion) experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang - the birth of the universe - and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life. It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles. So important is this mysterious substance that it has been called the "God Particle".
Scientists also hope to shed some light on the invisible material that exists between particles - dubbed "dark matter" as no one knows what it really is - which make up most of the universe.

What it will do?
Scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside CERN's tightly-sealed Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang, which occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets -- and eventually to life on earth.
"Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists."

What is it for?

Due to switch on in 2007, the LHC will provide collisions at the highest energies ever observed in laboratory conditions and physicists are eager to see what they will reveal. Four huge detectors � ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb � will observe the collisions so that the physicists can explore new territory in matter, energy, space and time. A fifth experiment, TOTEM, installed with CMS, will study collisions where the protons experience only very small deflections.