Web site offers Large Hadron Collider info

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has created a Web site focusing on the U.S. role in developing the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Switzerland.

The LHC -- to begin operating near Geneva, Switzerland, next year -- involves hundreds of U.S. physicists, engineers and students joining in the one most complex scientific instruments ever built. The Energy Department said the LHC experiments will address some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe.

The new website -- http://www.uslhc.us/ -- is funded by the department's Office of Science and is designed to be provide news and information about the particle accelerator, along with high-resolution graphic images, scientists’ blogs, resources for students and educators and other information.

The LHC, 17 miles in circumference, has been more than 15 years in the making. The machine will accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and make them collide, thereby creating conditions that existed billionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Scientists say the LHC could revolutionize our picture of the universe and might solve the mystery of dark matter.