Large Hadron Collider scientists celebrate initial success

Beams of protons collide at greater force than ever before

£5bn has been spent developing the LHC

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) celebrated a major breakthrough as its £5bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) achieved high-energy collisions of two protons yesterday.

The collisions occurred at energy levels of seven billion electron volts (7TeV), just under the speed of light in the 27km collider tunnel – that is more than three times the force previously achieved, and beats the 2.36TeV recorded by Cern last year.

The aim of the project is to simulate the events taking place one millionth of a millionth of a second after the big bang. This information is revolutionary in terms of understanding the fundamental nature of the universe.

The LHC has seen a number of setbacks since its launch in 2008, including the overheating of a badly soldered electrical splice, which caused extensive damage to parts of the collider and resulted in a £30m bill to fix it.

The massive IT requirements of the project include analysis of vast amounts of data – two petabytes per second – as well as development of grid technologies.

The collider will run almost constantly over the next 18 to 24 months.

"This will bring enough data across all potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world's foremost facility for high-energy particle physics," Cern said in a statement.