The LHC : a step closer to the Big Bang

13700 million years ago in the Big Bang, an immense concentration of energy was transformed into matter within less than a billionth of a second. The temperatures, densities and energies involved were extremely high. According to Einstein’s law E=mc, to create a matter particle of a certain mass (m), you need a corresponding amount of energy (E), with the speed of light (c) defining the exchange rate of the transformation. So the high energies shortly after the Big Bang could have created particles of very large mass. Physicists have proposed these hypothetical heavy particles to explain open questions about the creation and composition of our Universe. To investigate these theories, scientists have built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). If a type of particle can be created in the LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator, then it is assumed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. The LHC will collide particles using the highest kinetic energies that are currently technically possible (these energies correspond to those that are calculated to have existed 10 seconds after the Big Bang), crashing the particles into each other with close to the speed of light. This should result in new particles of higher mass than any previous experiments have achieved, allowing the physicists to test their ideas. Despite suggestions by the media, however, the energy of collisions in the LHC will be about 10 times lower than in the Big Bang, so fears that a ‘Small Bang’ could be recreated are unfounded.