Large Hadron Collider operations scheduled

GENEVA, Switzerland, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- European officials say the world's most powerful collider, the Large Hadron Collider, will make its first attempt to accelerate a beam of protons next month.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said the Sept. 10 event will follow a required cool down phase necessary to commission the particle accelerator.

The LHC, located near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to produce beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine -- and around 30 times more intense -- when it reaches design performance, expected by 2010.

Housed in a 16.7-mile tunnel, scientists said the multibillion-dollar accelerator relies on technologies that didn't exist only 30 years age. "The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype," CERN said.

The start-up process is a complex task, officials said, necessitating the cooling of each of the machine's eight sectors, followed by electrical testing of its 1,600 superconducting magnets.

Then the LHC must be synchronized with the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC's injector chain, scientists said, noting timing between the two accelerators must be accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond.

The first synchronization test was scheduled for Saturday.