European officials at the European Center or Nuclear Research announced that the Large Hadron Collider will accelerate the first proton beams on September 10. Even though this test run will not push the extremely powerful particle accelerator to its limits, it will be used as part of the calibration process which is supposed to take until spring to complete.

The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. It took 14 years to build and cost about $8 billion. It is supposed to accelerate particles to energies of 7 trillion electron volts, about 7 times more energetic than any accelerator in use today. However, until reaching this performance, the LHC has still a long way to go.

The European accelerator is contained in an underground tunnel 17 miles long which is located at the French and Swiss border near Geneva, with most of its length running underneath France and a little underneath Switzerland. The protons that are accelerated using the LHC are injected in the tunnel after they pass through 4 less powerful particle accelerators.

Officials at the CERN announced that the first particle beam will be injected in the LHC latter this month. However, the first time a proton beam will travel through the entire 17 miles track will be on September 10. At that time, the protons will be accelerated to energies of 450 billion electron volt, a value much smaller than what the accelerator can provide.

The energy that protons will gain after traveling through  the LHC will be increased up to the value of 5 trillion electron volts. Scientist hope that this value will be reached in spring 2009.