Built by more than 10,000 people from across the world at a cost of €10 billion, CERN's Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometre circular particle accelerator buried beneath the Swiss-French countryside. It smashes protons together in order to find out how atoms and other fundamental particles work.

It's also where the world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Now you can wander its corridors, experience near light-speed collisions and discover the mysterious Higgs boson right here in Sydney.

The Powerhouse Museum is hosting Collider on tour from the London Science Museum. It opened on Saturday and budding particle physicists and those curious about how the matter in our universe manages to stick together can get the full Large Hadron Collider experience until October 30.

Powerhouse director Dolla Merrillees said: "Visitors will be able to take a walk through the CERN control room, talk to virtual scientists and engineers and snoop around a researcher's workbench."

The scale of the LHC is mind-boggling.

Trillions of protons are fired around the particle accelerator at 99.9999991 per cent the speed of light and then smashed into each other, creating a kaleidoscope of even smaller particles.

The accelerator pathways are kept at temperatures colder than outer space using eight enormous helium fridges, with the proton beams contained by the world's most powerful magnets.

Some particle collisions momentarily reach temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun.

Information from these collisions is collected in cathedral-sized detectors and the data from this is distributed around the world, including to Australia, for analysis.

In 2012, data from the LHC confirmed the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the last piece in the puzzle of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Higgs boson was first theorised in the 1950s. Its existence allows the Higgs energy field to interact with all the other particles, allowing them to have mass.

Its discovery led to Peter Higgs' Nobel prize for physics in 2013.

But just because the Standard Model is complete, the story doesn't stop there.

"The next goal is to find new particles. The prime candidate here is for evidence of dark matter," said Dr Michael Schmidt, a theoretical physicist at the University of Sydney. Dr Schmidt works with the Australian Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics (CoEPP), which collaborates on experiments conducted at the LHC.

"We don't have direct evidence of dark matter but our understanding of the universe doesn't make sense if it isn't there," he said.

The LHC will be testing precision measurements of the Higgs boson, which should give us hints of new physics beyond the Standard Model.

"This could help us solve questions around why neutrinos have mass, or why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe and just what is dark matter," Dr Schmidt said.

It will also help to explore whether fifth and sixth dimensions physically exist by searching for even more exotic particles such as the heavy W boson.

The Collider exhibition displays historical items, including J.J. Thomson's cathode tube with which he discovered the existence of the electron in 1897.

"People often ask what does exploration of fundamental particles give us," said curator Andrew Jacobs. "J.J. Thomson could not have imagined his discovery of the electron would change the world in the way it has with electronics. In the same way, the discovery of the exotic particles by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are bound to change our world in ways we can't yet imagine."

During Science Week, Dr Jacobs will be giving guided tours of Collider, or you can wander around on your own.

As part of Sydney Science Week, the formal opening of the exhibition is on Thursday evening where the Powerhouse will open its doors at night for an adults-only special event hosted by astrophysicist, Lisa Harvey-Smith with festival ambassador Alan Duffy.