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A few years ago, Silver Spring resident Lloyd Purves, an engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, was struggling with a math problem at work for a week so he gave his son, Austin, a crack at it.

"He sat down for 20 minutes and came back with a solution," Purves said.

It was then that Purves knew his son, now age 21, had a bright future in math and physics. Austin Purves's summer job this year has proved his father right.

Austin Purves, a 2005 graduate of Springbrook High School and a senior at the University of New Hampshire, worked on one of the biggest physics projects in history: the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, which was officially activated Sept. 10 in Geneva.

An $8 billion experiment that took more than 8,000 scientists more than 14 years to complete at the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the collider is a 17-mile-long track, 300 feet beneath the border of France and Switzerland that will smash particles together at a capacity and speed never before reached and could recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang, according to international reports.

Austin Purves worked at CERN from June 9 to Aug. 18 in an unpaid position writing computer code for software that interprets the results of particle activity in ATLAS, an apparatus called a "detector," which branches off of the Large Hadron Collider to record the collisions within it.

ATLAS is responsible for locating the Higgs Boson particle, which scientists believe is the missing link to determining how mass and matter originate on a small scale, said Per Berglund, an associate professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire who had worked at CERN in the 1990s and got Austin Purves the job.

There were programs available to college students to work on the project and stay in dormitories at the CERN laboratory, but Austin Purves used a connection through Berglund to get the job on his own. He rented an apartment in Meyrin, Switzerland, which he says is to Geneva what Silver Spring is to Washington, D.C.

"To go to Europe and actually work, it's as close to European culture as you can get," he said of his living situation. "I got to see multiple sides of European culture, not just as a tourist, as the perspective of someone really living in Europe."

The experience could be a big step to gaining admission to a top graduate school, said Austin Purves, who plans to continue studying physics. Working on the Large Hadron Collider is an experience that almost no other people his age can claim, Berglund said.

"It's huge," he said. "For him to have the experience being at CERN and working there, it can be sort of a life-changing experience."

Austin Purves had always shown proficiency in physics, so it was exciting to see him earn such an opportunity, said Cyrus Ishikawa, a calculus and physics teacher at Springbrook High School who Austin Purves credits for his success.

"He was one of those students that took very few notes and knew everything," said Ishikawa. "He was a typical sponge."

"He's much smarter than either of his parents are," joked Lloyd Purves, who lives with his wife, Amy, a civil engineer, in the Quaint Acres neighborhood of Silver Spring.

For the time being, the Large Hadron Collider will only conduct tests to ensure things are running smoothly before any particle collisions are induced. But as the project progresses and key scientific discoveries are made, Austin Purves said he will fully realize the magnitude of his summer job.

"It's a very small piece of a very large puzzle, but it was nonetheless a necessary piece," he said. "… I'm excited to hear about the results and it will be gratifying to know I was part of those results."