The Large Hadron Collider, the huge particle accelerator in Switzerland which was switched on this week (see article), is a grand project that could yield all sorts of discoveries.

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The consensus among physicists is that particles began massless and got their mass subsequently from something known as the Higgs field the search for which was one reason for building the Large Hadron Collider, a huge and powerful particle accelerator located near Geneva.

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Searches for dark matter are also being carried out at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and other laboratories.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle accelerator, uses a staggering 1, 200 tonnes of superconducting wire, similar to the sort used in MRI, in order to speed protons up to within a whisker of the speed of light and to collide them inside vast detectors, themselves stuffed with several hundred tonnes of superconducting materials.

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