Independent Perspective News - Hole in ground to probe cosmic secrets

GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Europe's top particle physics research center has taken a major step in its plan to build the world's biggest "particle smasher" which it hopes will eventually unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe.

This week, it inaugurated a huge bottle-shaped vault which will house Atlas, an enormous detector of the micro-items of matter that make up life, the universe and everything.

Atlas, standing as high as a four-story building and twice as long, will almost fill the cavern, cut into rock beneath meadowland straddling the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.

The giant piece of machinery will form a central part of a "how things began" program at the multi-nation center -- CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The completed particle accelerator, which is due to start up in 2007, aims to recreate the conditions that existed within less than a billionth of a second after the "Big Bang" explosion -- probably around 15 billion years ago -- that created the known universe.

Scientists say this will give a much clearer view of how this created galaxies, planets -- and the life that so far is only known to exist on Earth.

To carry it out, CERN is building the world's largest scientific instrument -- the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC -- to operate in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel 75 meters (225 feet) down between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.

One of its main goals will be finally to catch the so-far theoretical "Higgs boson" that has eluded scientists at CERN and its U.S. counterpart Fermilab for nearly two decades.

The LHC replaces an earlier decade-long experiment known as the LEP, now dismantled, which two years ago came tantalizingly close to catching a glimpse of the Higgs boson that researchers think gives matter its weight.

Like the LEP, but many times more powerful, the LHC will project particles of matter at vast speeds in opposite directions around the tunnel, and the 7,000-ton Atlas and another detector will record what happens when they collide.

Some 2,000 scientists from 150 research laboratories in 34 countries are involved in the some $8 billion LHC project -- also financially backed by the United States which 10 years ago abandoned an even larger one for cost reasons.

CERN, founded 50 years ago, has 20 European member states who largely finance it, but the European Commission, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, the United States and Turkey have observer status -- and contribute to -- the body.