The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, announced the final countdown until they will begin operations on their powerful particle accelerator has started. We are less than 33 days away from the moment scientists will attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time.

A team of researchers has been working on preparations for the big day for a long time now. CERN explained that in order to start up the machine, each of its eight sectors needs to be cooled down. The next step involves the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. Afterwards, experts need to power together the circuits in each sector and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to make the machine work.

The operating temperature of the eight sectors is 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-2710C). Once this temperature has been reached, the LHC will need to be synchronized with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, thus forming the last link of the LHC’s injector chain.

CERN revealed that the first synchronization test has been scheduled for the August 9 weekend, for the clock-wise circulating beam, while the second test is expected to take place in the weeks to follow. The testing period will stretch until September, when the machine needs to be ready.

The LHC accelerator is capable of producing beams seven times more energetic than any other similar machine, and the beams are expected to reach their maximum intensity (30 times greater) by 2010, when the machine will reach maximum design performance.

Once the machine is ready, it should be able to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, CERN explained, which is the target energy for 2008. The first circulating beam should be produced on September 10, at the injection energy of 450 Gev (0.45 TeV).

“We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. “It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.”

The final part of the project will start once the circulating beams have been established. Bringing them into collision and commissioning the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV should take particle physics research “to a new frontier,” CERN said.

Scientists are now eager to see what the experiment can bring to light, perhaps recreate the first moments in the life of the Universe. The scientific community expects the results to go beyond all frontiers and turn things that we only dared to dream of into reality.

The idea of building a Large Hadron Collider dates back almost three decades ago. The project was named that way after “hadrons,” which are matter particles, such as protons.

“The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator on Earth,” CERN Director General Robert Aymar explained at a meeting held in Geneva in June this year, “but the Universe has far more powerful ones. The LHC will enable us to study in detail under laboratory conditions what nature is doing already.”