Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang. They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which has been in construction for some 13 years. The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force. Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.The vast circular tunnel - or "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. The magnets are there to steer the beam around this vast circuit. Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second. At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events. Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.
They will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass? The favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs. The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe. The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".

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