In February, the last piece of the ATLAS detector, the world’s largest general-purpose particle detector, has been lowered down a 300 feet shaft at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) underground facility along the Swiss-French border. This concluded the construction of the high-tech device which started in 2003.

The ATLAS detector, measuring 46 metres long, 25 metres high and 25 metres wide, will detect and trace particles called muons expected to be produced in particle collisions in the CERN accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Meanwhile, British physicist Peter Higgs said yesterday that he is certain the new device will find a particle named the "Higgs boson," which is named after him. Also dubbed the "God particle," its existence was claimed by Higgs as far back as 1964, but using only scientific calculations.

"I shall open a bottle of something," should the particle exist, the 79-year-old professor said to AFP. "It will be champagne -- whisky takes a little more time to drink," Higgs added.

The legendary physicist said that he would be very puzzled if the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will not find his namesake particle. Another team of researchers based at Fermilab in Chicago are also searching for it. They are using the Tevatron accelerator, currently the most powerful in the world, but its detection and data processing capabilities are nearly obsolete.

"It's hard for them to find it but it could be already in their data but not in their analysis yet," Higgs said.

European experiments are slated to begin later this year. The project will look for signs of the Higgs particle, which is believed by some scientists to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. CERN said in its statement that its entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels.

CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The United States is one of the Observers.