LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) _ Four Kansas University professors and several students and researchers are involved in the super collider experiments in Switzerland.

International scientists completed the first major phase of the Large Hadron Collider this month near Geneva. The project is meant to smash particles to open up research about the creation of the universe.

Kansas associate physics professor Michael Murray and Stephen Sanders, a Kansas physics professor and department chairman, are working on the nuclear physics side of the project. Professors Alice Bean and Phil Baringer are leading Kansas researchers in particle physics.

Physicists around the world are joining them. The supercollider project involves a 17-mile-long underground tunnel in a ring shape. Physicists designed it to allow them to fire two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons in opposite directions so they collide.

A failure announced yesterday will take at least two months to repair.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)