University of Pittsburgh researcher Joe Boudreau was awake all night watching history unfold on a video display he helped create that shows CERN's Large Hadron Collider in action.

Yesterday morning about 4:28 a.m., scientists steered the first proton beam around the 17-mile underground loop that straddles the border of France and Switzerland.

"It's a fantastic moment," LHC project leader Lyn Evans said. "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe."

The $10 billion international project is led by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva, with participation of 40 nations, including the United States.

The giant particle collider is designed to accelerate protons to near the speed of light, then crash them together. The key is documenting what new particles might result from the high-energy collision, possibly producing particles never seen before.

The project, which involved 8,000 scientists from 150 institutions, proves what can happen when nations, scientists and universities work together, with different teams focusing on different components.

Dr. Boudreau, a Pitt professor of physics and astronomy, actually nodded off before the first beam made its first rotation. But that didn't reduce the excitement of the moment. The technology developed by teams from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University had succeeded.

If all goes according to plans, CERN hopes its accelerator can detect the Higgs boson, which has been predicted but never proven to exist. The Higgs boson, which is thought to provide particles with mass, would complete the Standard Model, the theory describing the particles that make up matter.

There's also hope the accelerator can provide clues about dark matter, a theoretical constituent of the universe that continue to mystify physicists and astronomers.

The Pitt team included Dr. Boudreau, four other Pitt professors, three post-doctoral students and graduate students. One Pitt team led by Wilfred Cleland, a Pitt emeritus professor of physics, developed a large and complicated calorimeter, a key component of the Atlas Experiment.

The Atlas Experiment will measure the energy of particles and produce digital data so the information can be analyzed by supercomputers.

"It's extremely exciting," Dr. Cleland said. "We've been looking at cosmic rays. But seeing anything in the detector and making sense of it is exciting. It's hard to comprehend the magnitude of the number of cables and interconnections in this machine that computes and brings data. Seeing it work is a great relief."

Dr. Boudreau's team, which includes Thomas Kittelmann and Vakhtang Tsulaia, wrote the software for the visual monitoring system that allows scientists to see the collisions and analyze whether the Atlas Experiment is working. Dr. Boudreau can watch how the Atlas Experiment operates on screen inside Allen Hall in Oakland.

"I've never seen this level of enthusiasm for something in physics," Dr. Boudreau said. "Pitt's contribution here was the calorimeter, and it's one of the more robust and reliable pieces of hardware in the whole system."

The Carnegie Mellon team led by Thomas Ferguson worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, which provides a completely different method of recording what happens when protons and other particles collide. The system uses steel to filter out the muons, which are important particles.

Dr. Ferguson had been working on the project for 14 years, so the first successful beam was a notable accomplishment in his career. His team included three other Carnegie Mellon faculty members, four research scientists and three graduate students. Their role was developing electronic circuitry and chips to help capture and process information about the particle collisions.

"It is exciting and fun to build these electronics, do the research and development, and test the prototypes, then see how the final design works," Dr. Ferguson said. "The whole idea is to discover as much as we can about each collision."

Once all tests and calibrations are completed on the LHC, scientists will turn on two proton beams traveling in opposite directions, then make them collide inside the Atlas and CMS experiments.

It promises to be a historic moment in physics.

"LHC's research program has the potential to change our view of the universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that's as old as mankind itself," CERN Director General Robert Aymar said.