Cern Click - Short Edition

In a moment here on BBC News we will bring you Newswatch.

How did all began? What happened at the big bang? What is the universe

is made of? These are the questions that I have come here to find out.

Just outside Geneva, straddling France and Switzerland, is the

European Organisation for nuclear research, Cern.

A massive coming together of scientists who

are looking for the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Their most high-profile discovery in 2013 was evidence of the Higgs

boson, the particle that gives everything mass, and confirmation

that science's Standard Model of the universe is correct.

Under the ground, a series of four particle accelerators

gradually bring beams of particles up to close to the speed of light.

Then they are smashed together, and the particles are smashed apart.

The largest of these accelerators is the one that has made all

It creates temperatures of trillions of degrees,

and conditions similar to those at the birth of the universe.

This is the largest machine in the world, the Large Hadron Collider.

My guide is head of the Beams Instrumentation Group,

Roger E Jones, who I leave in no doubt at all about how happy

What you see here are what we call the focusing magnets.

So it's a bit like your lens in a camera.

So when you say focusing the particles down, you mean, like,

aligning them into a really narrow beam.

You can imagine it's a bit like you with the sunlight and a magnifying

They focus, all the particles come down here to a very tight spot

just beyond the wall, and that is where the collisions occur.

And from these collisions, we then look up to see where we can

find these new particles that we are talking about.

And getting these two extremely fine beams to collide is no mean feat,

and it is Roger's team who make that happen.

You're in effect the sniper, to get these beams exactly lined up.

We then feed back to make the current and we slightly adjust

So without you, these beams probably would miss each other.

As we turn and head back to the left, it is worth remembering

that, although the beams are tiny, the energies involved down here are

incredibly high, so high that humans are usually banned from this tunnel.

We're really lucky to be allowed down here, and

the only reason we are is because the LHC is switched off

If this was running, it would be far too dangerous

And in fact, we have all been given these little tokens.

And if any of these are detected by the sensors down here,

Having been down to the tunnel containing

the Large Hadron Collider itself, it is time to come up top and meet

The physicists conducting the experiments rely on engineers like

Giulia Papotti in the Cern control room, to make sure the proton beams

are injected correctly, and the accelerators behave themselves

Can you describe the kind of satisfaction that

You are not dreaming up the experiments,

Yeah, our job is to give the experiments good beam conditions,

I take pleasure, call it, when there's a problem,

Can I just point out, Julia works on a yoga ball.

There are some people who would say this could be a big waste of money,

what is the point of looking at the origins of the universe,

when there are more important things in the world to spend the money on?

It is a lot of money, but there's other things that I

think are less useful and on which more money is spent.

War is so much more, what we spend on one plane is comparable.

What we're doing here is the advancement of the knowledge

While we are building this we are learning more technology

Really, really useful and easy to understand is accelerators for

There's a whole world there, and it's the technology that is

built for accelerators that is used to cure people.

All these lights are just concerning regions

of the machine that we either allow access or we don't.

Each quarter of the control room runs a different

And since the LHC was offline for maintenance,

and things were suitably quiet, I was able to grab some time with

Paul Collier, Director of Beams, which is officially

This island is the one that looks after all

So for example, the electrical distribution system, the cooling

You must need a hell of a lot of electricity!

When the whole complex is running flat-out, we're drawing

Does anyone else notice when you go live?

Do the surrounding towns - do the lights kind of flicker?

No, because we're continually sucking and pushing energy backwards

and forwards between us and the outside world.

If we didn't have what we call compensators, then everybody's

lights would follow the 1.2-second pulse

of Cern in the Geneva area, and we would not be very popular.

So instead, we have a mechanism which damps this out, which

means that the outside world does not see this heartbeat of Cern.

The work here at Cern is some of the most extreme research being done

So far, we've seen the control room, and we've seen the

Now, it is time to see the place where it all happens.

One of four locations where those two high-energy proton

Nothing compact about it, if you ask me!

This is, um, a bit spiritual, really.

15m across, this leviathan is a collection of detectors that all

focus their attention on what is happening in the very centre.

And only because it is down for maintenance, only because it is

open, can we take you to its very heart.

Right, we're now all going to see something

that not many people will ever get to see in their life.

So this is where the beam of protons comes - it shoots through here.

It collides with another beam of protons that comes the other way.

The dead centre of this thing is where the collision happens.

The debris is flung out, and this massive detector sifts

through that wreckage looking for evidence of new particles,

Yeah, alright, compose yourself, Spenley!

But it turns out that it is not just overwhelming

Stephanie Beauceron, one of many scientists who churn through the

data generated by the LHC, likes to come down here as often as possible.

As a physicist, your everyday work is basically

And sometimes, like everyone in the industry,

you're frustrated by forgetting why you're doing this work.

So coming here and having a view to the detector with also visitors, and

showing them how great it is, just reminds me of really why I'm doing

such, because this is amazing to see what we can build all together to

make some research and discovery as we are expecting.

Switch it off, take it apart, and move on?

We still have plenty of things to detect!

We have still a lot of unknown, like why do we have more matter

We still don't understand what we call dark matter or dark energy

Could be coming from new particles that we are

Yep, the LHC certainly has its work cut out for it,

The collisions may be tiny, but the impact they'll have

on our understanding of the universe, and ultimately,

mankind's path through it, will be massive.

And I'm really sorry, but that is it from Click at Cern.

I'm gonna stick a tonne of photos on Twitter, so @bbcclick is where you

will find them, and you can check out our website for more throughout

Hello, and welcome to Newswatch with me, Samira Ahmed.