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The world's greatest particle accelerator

The final piece in the world's greatest particle accelerator in a 27-kilometre (43-foot) circular tunnel 100 metres under the French-Swiss border was put into place on Thursday, organisers said.

Scientists installed the final magnet in the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a project organised by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN where subatomic particles will collide at close to the speed of light.

The LHC, assembled over 15 years and involving more than 10,000 physicists and 500 research bodies and firms around the world, will be operational from November and may help unlock the final secrets on sub-atomic particles.

The project "could be the most ambitious scientific undertaking ever," and its results "will probably change our fundamental knowledge of the universe," its organisers say.

Scientists plan to smash together high-energy protons in two counter-rotating beams in the tunnel, just outside Geneva, to look for signatures of supersymmetry, dark matter and the origins of mass.

The beams are made up of bunches containing billions of protons which will be injected, accelerated, and kept circulating for hours, guided by thousands of powerful superconducting magnets.

Each proton goes around the 27 kilometre ring over 11,000 times a second.

The detectors will be able to see up to 600 million collision events per second, with scientists scouring the debris for signs of extremely rare events such as the creation of the Higgs boson, a suspected particle whose existence would explain mass.

"It will be like smashing two Swiss watches with complex workings against each other: afterwards we will look at the wreckage from the watches and try to understand how they were made," CERN project director Philippe Bloch said.

News inside news:
what is particle accelerator?
A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically charged particles to high speeds and to contain them. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: linear (i.e. straight-line) accelerators and circular accelerators. This page describes types of particle acclerators.
Linear particle accelerators:
In a linear accelerator (linac), particles are accelerated in a straight line with a target of interest at one end. Linacs are very widely used - every cathode ray tube contains one. They are also used to provide an initial low-energy kick to particles before they are injected into circular accelerators. The longest linac in the world is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, which is 3 km (2 miles) long. SLAC is an electron-positron collider.

Linear accelerators are also widely used in medicine, for radiotherapy and radiosurgery. Medical grade LINACs accelerate electrons using a klystron and a complex bending magnet arrangement which produces a beam of 6-30 million electron-volt (MeV) energy. The electrons can be used directly or they can be collided with a target to produce a beam of X-rays. The reliability, flexibility and accuracy of the radiation beam produced has largely supplanted the older use of Cobalt-60 therapy as a treatment tool.

CERN - The world's largest particle physics laboratory :
CERN Technology Transfer promotes the injection of science into all levels of daily life in many different ways. For example, nobody would ever have thought that a phenomenon based on quantum theory - quantum entanglement - would find practical applications in cryptography, computing and teleportation, and lead to the creation of companies to safeguard the sharing of information.