The first particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, took place Monday -- and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's high-energy physics team is already analyzing data.

The particle accelerator -- nearly 17 miles in circumference -- is designed to study the building blocks of all matter.

Two beams of subatomic particles called "hadrons" travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap.

Physicists will use the collider to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy.

UNL researchers are involved in one of the two largest experiments, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), designed to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

"The LHC startup has been going shockingly well, with the first collisions happening (Monday), so soon after the first circulating beams on Friday," said Ken Bloom, associate professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UNL's team, along with professors Dan Claes, Aaron Dominguez, Ilya Kravchenko and Greg Snow, plus graduate and undergrad students and postdoctoral researchers.

Two postdoctoral researchers, Helena Malbouisson and Jamila Butt, were in the control room of the CMS experiment during the first collisions.

Bloom said the team almost immediately started transferring data to the Holland Computing Center, mostly to the Red supercomputer in the Schorr Center at UNL.

For more information on the CMS experiment, go to: http://cms.cern.ch.