UK physicists come closer to discovering the plausibility of science fiction inspired ideas like warp` drives and time travel.
The researchers have completed the first crucial element of an experimental device designed to probe the forces that shape our Universe.
They hope to use the Atlas experiment to uncover the fundamental properties of matter and find what lies beyond our current understanding of physics.
It will be housed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, due to begin operating in 2007.
The primary goal of the experiment is to detect the Higgs boson particle, which explains why all other particles have mass.
The finished element is the first of the four barrels that will form the central part of the SemiConductor Tracker (SCT).
When complete, the aptly named Atlas will be 25m high, 46m long and will weigh about 7,000 tonnes.
The project has been and will be a long-time in the coming.
Ô[Atlas] has taken 10 years to plan, 10 years to build and it will take another 10 years for us to exploit the data,Õ says Georg Viehhauser an Atlas team member at the University of Oxford.
The machine works by pushing particles into each other.
Incredibly the resultant collision of these particles actually replicates the conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang, which created the universe, and generates other particles that can tell scientists more about the nature of the Universe.
In addition these collisions will occur at such a high energy level that they could produce heavier particles that could not be detected in previous particle accelerator experiments.
The experiments could open up a whole new region of physics to human understanding.
Andrew Zilouf
Scientists Strive to Find Limits of Physics
Scientists probe what is physically possible.
