Eureka! Scientists say they have replicated Big Bang in miniature with atom smasher

SCIENTISTS experimenting with world's largest atom smasher claim to have replicated the creation of the universe.

The 6.6 billion Large Hadron Collider's aims to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces and scientists collided the beams at an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts.

The collisions herald a new era for researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or Cern, in a 17-mile circular tunnel below the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

In a control room, scientists erupted with applause when the first successful collisions were confirmed. Their colleagues from around the world were tuning in by remote links to witness the new record.

Professor Bivek Sharma, at the University of California at San Diego, said the images of the first crashed protons were "beautiful".

"It's taken us 25 years to build," he said. "This is what it's for. Finally the baby is delivered. Now it has to grow."

Dubbed the world's largest scientific experiment, researchers hope the machine can approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorise was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of anti-matter 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.

Yesterday's initial attempts at collisions were unsuccessful because problems developed with the beams, said scientists working on the massive machine. That meant the protons had to be "dumped" from the collider and new beams had to be injected.