A machine that took 20 years to build could either shake the foundations of particle physics or entrench it more firmly, besides addressing some of the most fundamental questions facing science now.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a historic multi-billion dollar project involving over 8,000 scientists from 85 countries. CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva, Switzerland.

The world's largest collider will recreate conditions of the earliest universe. It will tear apart particles so physicists can study their components and observe as the particles put themselves back together, said Homer Neal, professor of physics and the U-M institutional representative for the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC.

LHC is scheduled to send the first proton beam zipping through its 27-km tunnel on September 10. Scientists expect it will take four to eight weeks to adjust the beams to produce particle collisions. They hope to observe the first collisions between October 8 and November 5.

ATLAS is one of the two large particle detectors on the collider. Michigan physicists and students helped design and build it. ATLAS and CMS, the other large particle detector, are looking for the same new particles, but in different ways. They back each other up, but they also will compete.

The Michigan University Group is the largest single institutional group in the LHC project, involving 25 of its physicists and students. More than 100 researchers from the university have been involved in the project over the years.

"Many of us who have been eager to search for the Higgs boson and to explore other particles have been waiting not just during the period we've been working on the CERN LHC, but even before then, as we watched the Texas project undergo years of planning and then crumble," Neal said.

The Higgs boson particle is perhaps the most sought-after prize of the project. The standard model of particle physics theorises that it gives other particles mass.

This theory says the Higgs creates a field that particles with mass interact with. Particles without mass don't interact with this field. The Higgs should be detectable at the energies the collider is capable of producing. If scientists find it, their standard model survives.

"If it does not exist," Neal said, "we'll clearly have to go back to the drawing board. That would shake the foundation of how we believe the smallest components of matter interact with each other and how mass itself is created. But even this outcome would be extremely exciting and would launch new avenues of exploration."