The first collisions between subatomic particles will take place in the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) next week, among fears that it might create a doomsday-like scenario for our planet.
The LHC circulates particles in a 17-mile-circumference underground tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, known by the acronym CERN.
According to a report in Telegraph, although there was much uproar last week about the first particles – protons – to whirl around the LHC at a shade under the speed of light, the real aim of the exercise is to bring counter rotating beams of particles into collision in the four "eyes" – detectors – of the machine to recreate conditions not seen since just after the birth of the universe.
These fears have been dismissed as nonsense by Dr. Evans, along with scientists such as Prof Stephen Hawking, who say that the end of the world is not nigh.
The original plan was to take 31 days from the first proton beams circulating in the LHC to smashing protons for the first time.
The collisions will take place in the two general purpose detectors of the giant machine, called Atlas and CMS, though Dr. Evans added that the team will also attempt collisions in Alice, which will study a "liquid" form of matter, called a quark-gluon plasma, that formed shortly after the Big Bang, and an experiment called LHCb, which will investigate the fate of antimatter in the wake of the Big Bang. (ANI)
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