New Nobel laureate Peter Higgs will make a rare appearance at the opening of the Science Museum’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) exhibition, Collider: step inside the world’s greatest experiment.

The exhibition, which opens to the public on 13 November and is the first of its kind, uses an immersive blend of theatre, video and sound art, plus real artefacts from the LHC, to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, offering the closest experience possible to visiting the famous site itself. It touches on the discovery of the Higgs boson, or ‘God particle’, the realisation of scientist Peter Higgs’ theory. Higgs himself will make a rare public appearance at the preview on 12 November to take a tour of the exhibition and share his reaction.

Collider has been created by the Science Museum in close collaboration with CERN and an award-winning creative team including Nissen Richards Studio, Olivier Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne (The Priory) and Olivier-winner video artist Finn Ross (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time).

The exhibition will ‘transport’ visitors into the heart of one of the greatest scientific experiments of our times: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Visitors can ‘meet’ virtual scientists and engineers from CERN, snoop around a researcher’s workbench and get exclusive access to real LHC artefacts including parts of the 15-metre magnets that steer the particle beam. The exhibition also follows the journey of particle beams as they are injected into the accelerator chain, ramped up to speed and steered around the 27km LHC tunnel, culminating in an awesome particle collision.

The £1m project was made possible by the support of Science & Technology Facilities Council; Winton Capital Management; exhibition benefactor The Embassy of Switzerland in the United Kingdom; with additional support from Advanced Oncotherapy plc, National Instruments, The Ogden Trust, and Collider exhibition Patrons and Supporters.