File picture of Chattopadhyay (circled) and his colleagues inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel

New Delhi, Sept. 9: Physicist Subhasis Chattopadhyay in Calcutta is waiting for his computer to flood with signatures of the fleeting antics of subatomic particles from the world’s largest experiment to begin tomorrow in an underground racecourse beneath Geneva.

Two beams of protons zipping in opposite directions at more than nine-tenths the speed of light will collide inside the tunnel, kicking off a fresh search for an elusive piece of a decades-old physics puzzle by mimicking conditions a whisker of time after the birth of the universe. The colliding protons will give rise to billions of subatomic particles each second.

Chattopadhyay at Calcutta’s Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) and his colleagues have built a device that will help track, count and study the behaviour of some of those subatomic particles.

“All these years of waiting will be over. We’re heading for the moment of truth,” said Chattopadhyay. At 1230 IST tomorrow, the first proton beam will circulate along the 27km circumference of the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a giant underground machine whose primary aim is to find a subatomic particle called the Higgs Boson that could help the world’s physics community to complete a theory named the Standard Model that explains elementary particles.

“The Higgs Boson is the missing piece of a puzzle. It explains the origin of mass of subatomic particles. If we find it, we can be sure of the standard model. If we don’t, then some chapters in physics may need to be rewritten,” said Chattopadhyay.

"Either way, physics will gain," said Bikash Sinha, director of VECC and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Calcutta. Researchers from the VECC, SINP, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and several Indian universities are among 6,000 scientists from 50 countries who have participated in the LHC that took $8 billion and 10 years to build.

The SINP-VECC team and physicists from the TIFR, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Jammu designed key components of detectors in the LHC that will help pick up signatures of subatomic particles spawned by the proton-proton collisions.

The TIFR and the VECC are also two of the nodes in a global computing grid to allow researchers at about 150 research centres across the world to analyse the enormous data generated by the LHC.

"The LHC should address some of the most fundamental questions facing science now," said Homer Neal, professor of physics at the University of Michigan in the US, who has been periodically working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the home of the LHC, for nearly 40 years.

The machine will re-create the conditions just microfractions of seconds after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. In recent weeks, some individuals have questioned the safety of the project, worrying that it may create black holes - "regions of intense gravity" -- that would gobble up Earth. But physicists have dismissed such scenarios as baseless.

Earlier this week, a Safety Assessment Group for the LHC asserted that the experiment poses no threat to humans or to Earth.

"Each collision of a pair of protons will release an amount of energy comparable to that of colliding mosquitoes," the group said. Any black hole created by the energy of such collisions would be microscopic and incapable of growing dangerously, it added.

The CERN is the organisation that created the Internet nearly 20 years ago.