1. What is the universe made of? How did it start? Physicists at CERN are seeking answers, using some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators. At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. ; ; CERN , . CERN, , . - . . , . 2. The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. ntimatter is material composed of antiparticles; which have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but have opposite charge and other particle properties such as lepton and baryon number, quantum spin, etc. Collisions between particles and antiparticles lead to the annihilation of both, giving rise to variable proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and less massive particle antiparticle pairs. The mass of any produced neutrinos is negligible, while they contain energy that generally continues to be unavailable after the release of particle-antiparticle annihilation. The total consequence of annihilation is a release of energy available for work, proportional to the total matter and antimatter mass, in accord with the mass-energy equivalence equation, E=mc2. CERN . . . Antimatter lepton , spin, . antiparticles , ( ), neutrinos antiparticle . neutrinos , - . , antimatter , - E=MC2. 3. Particle physics studies the tinest objects of Nature. Looking into the very small and fundamental, it also looks very far back into time, just a few moments after the Big Bang. Here are a few examples of dimensions particle physicists deal with: Atom: 10-10m Nucleus: 10-14m Quarks: