Birmingham Physicists’ Hopes for First Particle Collisions

Birmingham physicists are delighted that their experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that aim to find what happened just after the Big Bang, will soon be underway as scientists have successfully collided together two low-energy beams of protons for the first time. Based at the CERN laboratory, Geneva, the LHC is the world's largest machine and aims to discover many secrets of the nature of matter and the universe. By colliding particles at almost the speed of light, conditions similar to those a billionth of a second after the beginnings of the universe will be created. Scientists at the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy are playing vital roles in ALICE and ATLAS, two of the four main detectors that record the results of these collisions. ALICE will study the strong force - one of the fundamental forces of nature - and hopes to recreate and study the primordial soup that existed a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, an exotic state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. ATLAS will search for new heavy particles such as the Higgs boson and possible evidence for dark matter. David Evans, who leads the Birmingham team on the ALICE detector said, 'After many years of preparations, we are finally nearing our goal of making new and exciting discoveries about the nature of the universe itself.