A new particle collider that could shed light on the origins of the universe was built in part by scientists from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's highest energy particle collider, debuted Wednesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. Scientists celebrated as the machine, which cost $4.3 billion, successfully fired energy particles for the first time.

In the collider, a radiofrequency electromagnetic field propels charged particles through a 17-mile-long circular tunnel. The particles will collide at a higher intensity than ever before, producing results that researchers will use to re-examine a host of scientific theories.

"We call the LHC the discovery machine, where we take protons and smash them together as much as we can. Once we look at a million collisions, we can start to see what is happening," said Lauren Tompkins, a physics graduate student at UC Berkeley who worked on the collider.

Steve Gourlay, director of the Berkeley lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research division, said the machine could give scientists insight into how the universe began.

"In some sense, it is a time machine that reproduces the time right after the Big Bang that led to the distribution of types of particles we have now," he said. "So the goal is to get to ever higher energy to get particles and find out how the world works."

Particles will first be shot through the collider in October. Until then, researchers anticipate seeing rare processes for the first time.

Researchers from UC Berkeley and the Berkeley lab helped build the collider and are involved with two experiments, said Stewart Loken, deputy director of the physics division at the Berkeley lab.

A group called A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS made the detectors that track the particles after they collide, Loken said. The detectors capture data about the particles that are moving faster than the speed of light.

"That is a crucial measurement, because it can give information about particles which have a very short lifetime," Loken said.

Another group called A Large Ion Collider Experiment is using the machine to study matter on the smallest scale. It will collide heavy lead ions at record-high energy levels and may produce a new plasma, an ionized gas, said Peter Jacobs, the ALICE Physics group leader in the Berkeley lab's nuclear science division.

Engineers in the Berkeley lab's Accelerator and

Fusion Research division made many of the particle beams and the magnets that guide them.

In addition to possibly gaining a deeper understanding about the origins of the universe, the researchers hope to refine their scientific models with new data and discover new processes.

The physicists anticipate that the particles will collide and show supersymmetry for the first time. The theory holds that all matter on earth may have equivalents that make up the dark matter of the universe.

"All particles we know about have a twin that has the same property. To see this supersymmetry would be amazing so we're working on that as well," said Ayana Holloway, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley lab.

For scientists from UC Berkeley and the Berkeley lab, the new collider opens the door to a realm of new and unexplored possibilities.

"You can tell that for people who've been working on this for a lifetime, it's an exciting time," Tompkins said. "We're in a position we haven't been in since the beginning of the century."

Tags: LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY, PHYSICS