A group of physics professors and students from the University of Colorado are expecting some big surprises following the successful activation of the worlds brawniest particle accelerator near Geneva Wednesday morning.

About 10 CU-Boulder researchers are working on the Large Hadron Collider project, or LHC, which will send protons and charged atoms whizzing around a 17-mile underground loop at 11,000 times per second -- nearly the speed of light, the university announced in a news release.

Located on the border of France and Switzerland, the collider will smash particles together at energy levels seven times higher than the previous record by such accelerators.

"This is a very exciting project, because we are on the frontier of energy," said John Cumalat. "We are expecting some very big surprises in the coming months and years."

The CU team has been working with the "forward pixel detectors," which Cumalat called "the eyes of the device."

The forward pixel detectors will help researchers measure the direction and momentum of subatomic particles following collisions, providing clues to their origin and physical structure, he said.

One target of scientists is to find evidence of the "Higgs boson," a theoretical elementary particle that has been predicted by physicists and which is believed to hold clues to the mass of matter. Confirmations of the Higgs boson would complete the so-called standard model of the known particles, said Cumalat.

A single second of data acquisition will be equal to the data volume of 10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica sets, said Cumalat.

"We view CMS as our Rosetta Stone for understanding subatomic particles," he said.

Scientists Beaming After Test Of Big Atom Smasher

Tension mounted in the five control rooms at CERN Wednesday morning as scientists huddled around computer screens. After a few trial runs, they fired a beam of protons clockwise around the 17-mile tunnel of the collider deep under the rolling fields along the Swiss-French border. Then they succeeded in sending another beam in the opposite, counterclockwise direction.

The physicists celebrated with champagne when the white dots flashed on the blue screens of the control room, showing a successful crossing of the finish line on the $10 billion machine under planning since 1984.

"The first technical challenge has been met," said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. "What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it's for the physicists to show us what they can do.

"They are ready to go for discoveries," Aymar said. "Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we're looking at essential questions for mankind."

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider's two largest detectors -- essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons -- are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

It is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle -- the Higgs boson -- which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC provides much greater power than earlier colliders.

Its start came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes -- subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, which also received support for the project by leading scientists such as Britain's Stephen Hawking.

Gillies said the only risk would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel. No one would be endangered because the tunnel is evacuated when beams are being fired.

No such problem occurred Wednesday, although the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million. Japan, Canada, Russia and India -- also observers -- are other major contributors.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, said Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time.

Maiani and the other three former directors-general attended Wednesday's experiment.