Cern

The physicists working at CERN are looking for things like antimatter and dark matter and how the universe works.

Searching for those differences is one of the tasks for the people at the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of four main experiment sites around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Bystanders gaping at a giant screen watched physicists hunched over computers at the CERN Control Center inject the first beam of protons into the Large Hadron Collider.

Scientists believe a poor soldering job on one of the particle collider's 10,000 connections caused the fault. CERN spokesman, James Gilies, tells VOA it is unlikely that the machine will be up and running until spring or summer.

Physicists who will conduct experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are generally focused on pure research, not practical applications. But as in the past, there are likely to be important spin-offs. Previous discoveries from fundamental science have led to indispensable tools in medicine, industry and research. And then, of course, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. It was a spin-off from CERN's large research program in information technology.

The LHC is expected to produce frontier physics for about 10 years. But scientists already are discussing the next generation of accelerator to be built. The scientific community generally agrees the LHC's successor will be a giant linear electron-positron collider, about 30 kilometers in length. Competition among CERN, the United States and Japan to win the rights to build the machine is intense.

The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator will begin operations later this year at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Scientists believe the new atom-smasher, known as the or LHC for short, will help them answer questions about the origin of the universe. The collider is 27 kilometers in circumference, straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva, buried as deep as 150 meters underground.

Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University say that these neutrinos contain energies that are thousands to millions of times greater than those generated by particle colliders/accelerators such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider, located on the border between France and Switzerland.