LHC: UK scientists creating 'mini Big Bangs' about to start later this week

British scientists working with CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are recreating the conditions of the moments after the creation of the universe, producing the highest temperatures and densities to ever be recorded in an experiment.

The physicists from the University of Birmingham, backed with funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, are taking part in the LHC's 11,000 ton ALICE experiment, which seeks to study the consequences of accelerating and smashing together lead nuclei at the highest possible energies, thus creating sub-atomic fireballs.

Geneva, 4 November 2010. Proton running for 2010 in the LHC at CERN1 came to a successful conclusion today at 08:00 CET. Since the end of March, when the first collisions occurred at a total energy of 7 TeV, the machine and experiment teams have achieved all of their objectives for the first year of proton physics at this record energy and new ground has been explored. For the rest of the year the LHC is moving to a different phase of operation, in which lead ions will be accelerated and brought into collision in the machine for the first time.

A major target for 2010 was to reach a luminosity – a measure of the collision rate – of 1032 per square centimetre per second. This was achieved on 13 October, with two weeks to spare. Before proton running came to an end, the machine had reached twice this figure, allowing experiments to double the amount of data collected in the space of only a few days.

The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Carol wrote:The question I have is why are they really spending all of this money to do this. Hotter then the sun? Scary.

Carol wrote:You know of course the scifi mind within is saying... they're opening up a portal. But a portal to where?