The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which is being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. When it will switch on in 2008, it will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate on particles proprieties.
Scientists have found that everything in the Universe is made from a small number of basic building blocks called elementary particles, governed by a few fundamental forces. Some of these particles, such as the electron, are stable and form normal matter. Others, such as the muon, have a fleeting existence before decaying to the stable ones. Still others, such as the Higgs boson, are believed to have existed for a few instants after the Big Bang, but they are absent in today's universe.