Large Hadron Collider

The organisation that operates the Large Hadron Collider has set a date for the start of its science programme.

On Tuesday 30 March, engineers will make their first attempt to collide beams at an energy of 3.5 trillion electronvolts (TeV) per beam.

The LHC reached this beam energy last week, breaking its own particle beam energy record.

But, among other things, engineers will need to ensure the beams are stable at 3.5 TeV before trying for collisions.

"With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we're on the verge of launching the LHC physics programme," explained Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at Cern, where the LHC is based.

"But we've still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself. It's a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way."

Between now and 30 March, the LHC's team will be working to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the machine's detectors, or experiments, from stray particles.

All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions at 3.5 TeV can begin, Cern says.

"Symbolically, the start of the LHC research programme is when we start systematically colliding beams for physics at the energy we have chosen for this year," Cern's director of communications Dr James Gillies, told BBC News.

"That's what we're hoping for a week today."

The LHC is being used to smash together beams of proton particles in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

It is the world's largest machine and is housed in a circular tunnel which runs for 27km under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

Some 1,200 superconducting magnets bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, allowing particles to smash into one another.

Detectors located at the crossing points will scour the wreckage of these collisions for discoveries that extend our knowledge of physics.