Big Bang Research

Code-named FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), the device will be built at Darmstadt, south of the city of Frankfurt, and will be one of the biggest new science projects in Germany of the coming decade.

The German Society for Heavy Ion Research (GSI), a premier nuclear physics lab concentrating on heavy ions, is to oversee the 1.2 billion euro ($1.7 billion) device, which will begin in 2013 to use beams of ions and anti-protons to help physicists discover how matter came into being.

An ion is an electrically charged atom, and GSI defines a heavy one as anything heavier than helium.

"This laboratory will be recreating a mini-version of the Big Bang," said Horst Stöcker, the GSI scientific director, referring to the primal explosion 14 billion years ago with which the existence of the universe began.

Recreating the start of the universe -- sort of

"The substance we'll be making resembles that in the first microseconds of the Big Bang, when it was a million times hotter than at the center of the sun. We're talking a million times 10 million degrees Celsius."

The 3,000 scientists to work at FAIR will find out how the different chemical elements developed.

Stöcker said he cannot guess what the answers will be, but added that FAIR will be Darmstadt's key laboratory for the next 25 years.

Past GSI achievements include discovering short-lived, new heavy elements such as element 108, hassium, and element 110, darmstadtium, which is named after the city of Darmstadt.

Scientists believe that all the elements heavier than iron arose from supernovae, or explosions of stars, and will also reconstruct these events in FAIR, which is a double ring with a circumference of 1,100 meters (3,609 feet).

Lightspeed crashes planned in Darmstadt

An existing particle accelerator at GSI will be re-used as a kind of first stage in the new facility, which will accelerate particles to 99 percent of the speed of light, then crash them into atomic nuclei.

Unlike another famous accelerator, at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, FAIR's specialty will not be the speed of the particles, but rather the intensity of the beam.

"With CERN, it's like getting a look at a new country at high speed from the highway," spokesman Ingo Peter said. "With FAIR, it will be like 1,000 four-wheel-drives swarming over it off-road.

"We have different scientific purposes. CERN scientists can tell you how the far side looks. We'll be able to tell you about the fine detail of this new country: matter."

Germany is to pay 75 percent of the costs of FAIR, with the other 14 nations, also including Spain, Britain, Poland, China and Russia, contributing the rest.