Vital experiment in particle physics nears countdown

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Geneva, Mar 24 : Mighty things are going on at CERN, Europe’s atom-smashing laboratory where the Pakistanis work alongside Indians and Palestinians alongside Israelis.

Below ground, in a vast circular tunnel below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the final pieces of a gigantic machine are being set in place for an extraordinary investigation into the infinitely small.

If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, which is so tantalising that it has been called “the God Particle.”

The “Higgs,” named after a British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos.

Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain dark matter and dark energy—strange phenomena that, stunned astrophysicists discovered a few years ago, account for 96% of the Universe.