The giant new particle collider at Europe’s centre for nuclear research, which is due to start work on Wednesday, is being linked to spectacular spin-offs including improved cancer treatments, systems for destroying nuclear waste and insights into climate change.

“Everyone is looking at the start up of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] but Cern has many other research programmes with important practical uses,” said Paul Collier, who runs the main control room at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern).

The first beams of particles have been successfully fired around nearly half of the 17-mile tunnel in Switzerland, where Cern is based. Linked research has already spurred useful byproducts.

In a typical year, the huge machine, which will smash particles into each other at enormous speed, should generate enough data to fill 56m CDs. That means physicists have had to create a sophisticated system for organising information extremely quickly. The Grid, as they call it, is likely to become the model for many other systems designed to handle large volumes of data.

Another project has suggested a potentially radical new way of dealing with nuclear waste. Cern’s physicists found that firing a beam of protons (a type of sub-atomic particle) into blocks of lead could generate a shower of neutrons (another sub-atomic particle) – and that these could then be used to break down radioactive waste into harmless stable elements.

A Cern spokesman said the technique was being studied by industry. “This technology sprung from insights into matter generated by pure physics,” he said.

Cern has also contributed to medical research, treating cancers with beams of charged particles such as protons, carbon ions and even antimatter.

Antimatter does not exist naturally but Cern can make it using a smaller accelerator, the proton synchrotron. The machine is also involved in generating the protons that will orbit around the LHC. The interest in such beams arises because existing forms of radiation therapy may kill cancers but damage surrounding tissue.

Particle beams could minimise such damage as they can be tuned to pass through healthy tissue and deposit energy only in the tumour.

Cern’s latest research project may prove the most controversial. It is building a laboratory to investigate the theory that the rate of cloud formation in the atmosphere is linked to the level of cosmic rays.

Cloud formation is a vital component of climate and weather, and the project could place Cern at the heart of the debate on whether other factors besides greenhouse gases are involved in climate change.

The researchers will use a proton beam from the proton synchrotron to simulate cosmic rays, firing them into a so-called “cloud chamber” to see whether mini clouds form.

Bob Bingham, professor of physics at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, who is involved with the project, said: “If the beams cause cloud formation it will suggest a link between cosmic rays and climate which has interesting implications.”

On Wednesday scientists will find out whether the LHC’s £3 billion cost has paid off.

In the past few days beams of particles have been fired through three of the LHC’s eight sections, also passing through Alice, and LHCb, two of the four main experiments. Both worked well.

The two other experiments, Atlas and CMS have not seen a beam but appear to be working – as shown by their ability to detect natural cosmic rays.

If Wednesday’s start-up goes smoothly a second beam will be fired into the machine travelling in the opposite direction– with the two forced to collide. The products of those collisions could give physicists their best insight into the structure and origins of the universe.

Nobel hope

Cern’s particle smasher could offer Professor Stephen Hawking with his best chance yet of winning a Nobel prize – if it confirms his theory that black holes give off radiation.

Hawking put forward the idea in the early 1970s that black holes could emit radiation. It proved controversial at the time because most scientists believed that black holes had such powerful gravitational fields that nothing could escape from them.

Since then Hawking’s hypothesis has won wide acceptance but remains unproven – and Nobel prizes in physics are awarded only when there is experimental evidence for a new phenomenon.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern could change all that. Some physicists predict that microscopic black holes could be produced and that these would evaporate in a flash of Hawking radiation.

“If the LHC proves the existence of Hawking radiation it would be Nobel prizes all round,” said Dr Ben Allanach at Cambridge University.

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