By Xinhua
Beijing : A 100-ton wheel has been hooked up to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator LHC last Friday, which scientists hope will help unlock the secrets of the universe, media reported Monday.
The wheel was lowered down a 100-metre shaft and aligned within a millimeter of other detectors at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s leading centre for particle research located at a sprawling complex along the Swiss-French border.
The ATLAS detector will measure particles called muons expected to be produced in particle collisions in the accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The LHC will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, which many scientists believe gave birth to the universe, by colliding two beams of particles at close to the speed of light.
“As particles pass through a magnetic field produced by superconducting magnets, this detector has the ability to accurately track them to the width of a human hair,” CERN said.
Experiments at the LHC, which lies in an underground tunnel measuring over 40 km in circumference, should allow physicists to take a big leap on a journey that began with Isaac Newton’s law of gravity, it said.
Science has been unable to explain fundamental questions such as how particles acquire mass. The experiments will also probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe and why there is more matter than antimatter.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said: “We know about 4 percent of the universe. The LHC might teach us about what the remaining 96 percent of the universe is made of, what cosmologists call dark matter.”