A COLEG Meirion-Dwyfor lecturer has been to see the largest-ever single machine built in the world.

Physics lecturer Rhodri Llwyd was one of only 20 teachers in Wales lucky enough to visit the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

As part of the second Welsh Teacher Programme’s visit to Switzerland, the lecturer attended lectures, on-site visits and exhibitions and hands-on workshops, as well as seeing the equipment and learning first-hand about cutting-edge particle physics.

Rhodri has been teaching A-level physics at Dolgellau since 2011 and at Pwllheli since 2014 at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor.

He said: “The photo shows me standing in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider next to the Compact Muon Solenoid.

“This was one of the detectors that gathered evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is the particle that allows matter in the Universe to acquire mass. It was first postulated in the 1960s by Peter Higgs.

“We were very lucky to have been able to go down to this area, as it is usually sealed up doing measurements. It was in the final days before re-sealing and moving up to even higher energies to explore even more massive particles - perhaps to ‘shine light’ on dark matter!”