Key senior scientists from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be delivering a public lecture in Malta about the recent discoveries of the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful scientific instrument ever constructed by mankind.

The LHC is situated on the Franco-Swiss border and is 27 km long. It cost €7.5 billion and took 24 years to be designed and built. Its goal is to study the composition of matter and forces that bind it together.

Also known as the Big Bang machine, the LHC led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. CERN also announced that the LHC may have started to see something new and unforeseen.

The lecture is being organised as part of an international conference hosted by the University of Malta and led by CERN. Eighty-five senior scientists from all the major European organisations in the field will be attending. Nicholas Sammut, Pierluigi Mollicone and Marija Cauchi from the Faculty of ICT and from the Faculty of Engineering form the local organising scientific committee.

A collaboration agreement signed by the University in 2003 and another signed by the Maltese government in 2008 enabled five University PhD students and three Master’s students to conduct their research while residing at the CERN labs.

No prior knowledge in science is required to understand or attend the lecture. It will be held in the auditorium of the new Faculty of ICT building at the University tomorrow at 6.15pm.

A second free lecture for academics, scientists, engineers and students will be held on Thursday at 5pm in the same auditorium.

For more information, e-mail nicholas.sammut@um.edu.mt.

The conference is supported through the FP7 EUCARD-2 ‘Enhanced European coordination for accelerator research and development’, which is co-funded by the partners and the European Commission under Capacities 7th Framework Programme, Grant Agreement 312453.