Currently under construction, the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for short, is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva in Switzerland. It is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008 and is expected to become the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator.

As its name says, LHC is a hadron collider. A hadron is a subatomic particle composed of elementary particles called quarks. There are two classes of hadrons: Baryons such a protons and neutrons formed of three quarks, and Mesons which are particles composed of a quark and antiquark, mainly known as bosons.

The Large Hadron Collider will probe the inner structure of the matter, to study the mysteries regarding the smallest particles of matter, the origin of matter, dark matter, and secrets of the early universe.

The actual structure is contained in a circular tunnel about 27 kilometers long, at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 meters underground, formerly used by a electron-positron collider. It is hopper that the collider will be able to detect the only particle form the Standard Model that has not yet been discovered, named the Higgs boson, thought to explain the mass of other elementary particles, in particular the huge difference between massless bosons such as the photon and the relatively heavy W and Z bosons, and to seek to unify three of the four fundamental forces, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, the last known force, gravity might be explained by the observation of Higgs boson.

People both inside and outside the physics community have expressed concern that LHC would trigger one of the disasters capable of destroying the entire universe. LHC could in theory produce tiny black holes, magnetic monopoles that could catalyst the decay of matter, strange matter or even a strangelet.

Scientist say that the LHC poses no such problems, as the energies at which it will operate are much smaller than some cosmic rays which are millions of times more energetic than anything that will ever be produced by LHC. Quantum calculations show that any tiny black hole created in LHC will evaporate through Hawking radiation before it can accrete any matter and any magnetic monopole that could catalyze matter decay will quickly exit Earth.