In what will essentially be the world’s biggest and most expensive physics project thus far, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom smasher in Geneva, would Tuesday begin smashing two proton beams together at extraordinarily high energies of seven trillion electronvolts (TeV).

The smashing of the proton beams at the highest-ever energies will mark the commencement of 18-24 months of intensive investigations at the LHC; with the scientists endeavoring to replicate conditions existing at ‘less than a billionth of a second’ after the Big Bang that supposedly created the universe.

Earlier, on March 19, the scientists circulated 3.5 Tev beams in the 17-mile-long collider under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. Since the stability of these beams has been established, they will now be allowed to cross paths and collide on Tuesday.

The beams of protons that will travel around the LHC will carry over three times the till-now-the-highest energy of particles in the US accelerator. Scientists are hopeful that the resulting collisions will unfold new information about the nature of the universe and its creation.

However, elucidating that the data collected from the sub-atomic collisions will take time to evaluate, Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the CMS detector at the LHC, said: “Major discoveries will happen only when we are able to collect billions of events and identify among them the very rare events that could present a new state of matter or new particles.”