The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

What is it, LHC? The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

When the project began? The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics.

Purpose Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down altogether.

Detectors. Six detectors have been constructed at the LHC, located underground in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points.

Location of detectors.

CMS hunt for the Higgs boson and look for clues to the nature of dark matter.

Atlas one of two general purpose detectors. ATLAS will be used to look for signs of new physics, including the origins of mass and extra dimensions.

Parts of the ATLAS detector

The first beam was circulated through the collider on the morning of 10 September 2008.

To be continued... CERN has declared that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012, with a short technical stop at the end of In 2013 the LHC will go into a long shutdown to prepare for higher-energy running starting in 2014.

Findings CERN scientists estimate that, if the Standard Model is correct, a single Higgs boson may be produced every few hours.

Cost With a budget of 7.5 billion euros (approx. $9bn or Ј6.19bn as of Jun 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built.

Here is another one... Fermilab's Tevatron is a landmark particle accelerator; at 3.9 miles (6.3 km) in circumference, it is the world's second largest energy particle accelerator

And what about safety? The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider sparked fears among the public that the particle collisions might produce doomsday phenomena, involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.

There is nothing to worry about! Two CERN-commissioned safety reviews examined these concerns and concluded that the experiments at the LHC present no danger and that there is no reason for concern

Popular culture The Large Hadron Collider gained a considerable amount of attention from outside the scientific community and its progress is followed by most popular science media. The LHC has also sparked the imaginations of authors of works of fiction, such as novels, TV series, and video games.

Finally... Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The Earth Yet?

NO.