Hollywood star Tom Hanks may switch on the LHC later this year

Actor Tom Hanks has agreed to turn on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) once it has been fixed.

The LHC, which is the worlds most powerful particle accelerator, based at the European particle-physics facility CERN in Geneva, is currently being repaired after breaking down in September last year, just nine days after circulating its first proton beams. (See: LHC experiment hits major snag with helium leak, two-month delay likely)

Researchers at the LHC had originally scheduled an annual shutdown of the machine between November and April because of the high cost of electricity during the winter months. But this year, they plan to run for it 10 months through the winter to make up for lost time.

The collider, the world's largest, is designed to accelerate the subatomic particles known as protons around a 17-mile underground racetrack to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then crash them together in search of new forms of matter and new laws of nature.

For its first year, the collider will operate at 5 trillion electron volts, rather than the design standard of 7 trillion, because that is the highest level for which the magnets have yet been tested. That is still five times the energy of the second-largest accelerator in the world, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, USA.

Tom Hanks recently visited CERN to promote his new film Angels and Demons, in which he plays Harvard University symbologist Robert Langdon, who is investigating a plot to annihilate the Vatican with 0.25 grams of antimatter stolen from CERN. In reality, CERN has produced less than 10 nanograms (ten billionths of a gram) of antimatter in its 55-year lifetime.

Angels and Demons is the second book by Dan Brown to be filmed on Tom Hanks, after the successful release of The Da Vinci Code two years back.

"I asked Hanks if he'd like to come back for the switch-on and he said 'yes'," says Steve Myers, CERN's director of accelerators and technology, after giving him a guided tour of the LHC's 7,000-tonne ATLAS experiment on 13 February.

CERN is a beautiful place, he announced at a press conference held after an eight-and-a-half minute preview of the film. Magic is not happening here, magic is being explained here, he added. CERN's head of communications, James Gillies, confirmed that the facility would be delighted to have Hanks there to re-start the LHC.

Angels and Demons includes footage of the LHC and images of sinister canisters that hold the antimatter suspended inside them.