Scientists rejoiced last night when they managed to smash proton beams together for the first time in a £6bn giant machine designed to reveal clues about the origins of the universe.
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the nuclear research organisation near Geneva, hope their experiments can recreate conditions moments after the big bang. The machine, which occupies an almost 17 mile-long tunnel 100 metres beneath the French-Swiss border, achieved the collisions by sending two groups of sub-atomic particles around in opposite directions at the same time.
Collisions were recorded in all four of the main detectors during "experiments" in rooms the size of cathedrals.
"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said Cern's director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer.
Researchers waited eight years for the machine to be built, only to see it partially explode shortly after being switched on in September last year. Repairs and a new safety system cost an estimated £24m.
Earlier this month, work on the machine was again interrupted when a short circuit took out an electrical substation. The incident was blamed on a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.
"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and, hopefully, discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said Fabiola Gianotti, who represents the Atlas particle physics experiment at Cern.
The key aim of the project is to try to discover how the universe took shape, after the big bang 13.7bn years ago spilled out energy and matter at vast speeds that eventually became stars – including our sun – planets and then life itself.
The scientists plan to increase the beam intensity and accelerate the particles further. They hope the collider will help them see and understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.