Feb. 3: Unlocking the Mystery of Matter Elliott Cheu, UA professor of physics, is involved in historic experiments just beginning at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which is a 17-mile ring tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border. The tunnel was built to smash protons as they travel at 99.999999 percent the speed of light, enabling researchers to observe the most fundamental particles of matter and the processes that occurred during the first second after the Big Bang, the moment the universe is believed to have begun.