The world's largest scientific experiment, a 27-kilometre circular underground tunnel built to smash particles into each other, has been recreated at the Queensland Museum for the public to learn more about how our universe works.
Hadron Collider: Step inside the world's greatest experiment is an exhibition that gives you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the particle physics lab at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) where the Large Hadron Collider, a tunnel built under the border between France and Switzerland, operates.
CERN's $4.4 billion dollar LHC is a ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures that forces two high-energy particle beams to travel close to the speed of light, before colliding.
The task of making them collide has been likened to firing two needles about 10 kilometres apart with enough precision that they meet halfway.
Queensland Museum Network CEO and director Professor Suzanne Miller said the exhibition helps to transport visitors virtually to the CERN laboratory.
"Visitors can talk to virtual scientists, walk the tunnels of CERN, explore the control room and stand in the heart of a particle collision," she said.
The LHC is one of the coldest places in the universe at minus 271 degrees Celsius and contains some of the most powerful magnets on earth.
The beam pipes are emptier than the vacuum of space and the area where the particles collide is the hottest place on earth at 5.5 trillion degrees.
The LHC is capable of generating up to 600 million particle collisions per second.
Lead curator for the exhibition and keeper of science collections at the Science Museum in London, Alison Boyle, said the purpose of this structure was to uncover the fundamental building blocks of our universe.
"If we can take subatomic particles and get them moving together and moving very fast and colliding at high energies, we can actually create new particles," Dr Boyle said.
"That is explained by Einstein's famous E=mc² equation that says energy and matter can be thought of as complementary.
"That enables us to explore new phenomena and understand how the universe works on a fundamental level."
In 2012, scientists working at LHC announced their discovery of a particle that behaves the way a Higgs boson should behave, a subatomic particle Dr Boyle said was the last piece in the jigsaw of humanity's present knowledge of particle physics.
"The Higgs is a little bit hard to think of, it is essentially the particle that gives all other particles mass, it explains why the other particles are like they are," she said.
"Peter Higgs theorised there was something called the Higgs field that permeates the entire universe and the other particles interact with that and that gives them their characteristic.
"With the Higgs boson, you get it from creating a disturbance in the Higgs field and you do that by creating very high energy collisions, which you can do in the LHC.
"You can think of it as a bit of a ripple in this field."
Dr Boyle said the discovery of the Higgs boson would validate the current model physicists use.
"If anything shows up it will be completely unexpected and that will point to completely new ways of looking at the universe," she said.
