The world's largest atom smasher has set a record for high-energy collisions by crashing two proton beams at three times more force than ever before.
Physicists at a Swiss research centre achieved high-powered collisions of sub-atomic particles today in their attempt to create mini-versions of the Big Bang that led to the birth of the universe.
The 10 billion Swiss francs (€7 billion) Large Hadron Collider directed the beams into each other today as part of its ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces.
Scientists at a control room at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or Cern, broke into applause when the first successful collisions were recorded. Their colleagues from around the world were tuning in by remote links.
The collisions start a new era of science for scientists working on the machine below the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The experiment, which created a record for the energy of particle conditions, will allow researchers to examine the nature of matter and the origin of stars and planets 13.7 billion years ago.
"This is a major breakthrough. We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics," said Oliver Buchmueller, one of the key figures on the project.
The collisions took place at a record total collision energy of 7 billion billion electron volts (eV) and at a nano-fraction of a second slower than the speed of light in CERN's 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), about 100 metres below the Swiss-French border.
The experiment was delayed for a few hours by a couple of technical glitches with the power supply and an over-sensitive magnet safety system. This led the physicists to suspend the mega-power particle collisions, the focus of the world's largest scientific experiment.
After the problems arose as beams were injected into the collider in the early morning, Cern officials were quick to dismiss any suggestion that it was a repeat of a major incident in September 2008 that seriously damaged parts of the experiment and delayed the full launch of the project until now.
During the coming months and years, Cern scientists expect the project to lift the veil on some of the mysteries of the cosmos - how matter was converted to mass after the fireball of the Big Bang and what is the dark, or invisible, matter that makes up an estimated 25 per cent of the universe.
Today’s experiments proceeded despite the objections of some people who fear they could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes - subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
Cern and many scientists dismiss any threat to Earth or people on it, saying that any such holes would be so weak that they would vanish almost instantly without causing any damage.
The LHC was launched with great fanfare on September 10th, 2008, but it was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated, causing extensive damage to the massive magnets and other parts of the collider.
It cost €30 million to repair and improve the machine so that it could be used again at the end of November. Since then the collider has performed almost flawlessly, giving scientists valuable data in the four-week run before Christmas. It soon eclipsed the next largest accelerator - the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago.
The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of antimatter and the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorise gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director-general of Cern has said it is likely to take months before any scientific discoveries are made, partly because computers will have to sort through massive amounts of data produced by the collisions.
Dr Heuer said researchers hope by the end of this year to make discoveries into the dark matter. The better understood visible matter makes up only 4 per cent of the universe.
Dark matter has been theorised by scientists to account for missing mass and bent light in faraway galaxies. Scientists believe it makes galaxies spin faster.
A separate entity called "dark energy," making up the remaining 70 per cent of the universe, is believed linked to the vacuum that is evenly distributed in space and time. It is believed to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Other possible candidates for discovery are hidden dimensions of space and time.
Physicists have used smaller colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.