There is no truth to the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and using the collider to open up a portal to hell, Dejan Stojkovic, a physics professor at the University of Buffalo, told USA TODAY in an email.

“To create a black hole or a wormhole, even microscopic ones, with our current technology, in the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe,” Stojkovic said. “So there is no chance whatsoever to create such a portal at the [Large Hadron Collider].”

The collider uses a strong magnetic field to accelerate charged particles, or protons, at very high energies in a circular tunnel, Stojkovic said. When two beams of these particles collide, detectors, which are located around the beams, record the outcome of these collisions.

“Since these are previously unexplored energies in a controlled environment, we might expect production of some new elementary particles that we did not know if they existed,” Stojkovic said. “However, these are microscopic particles, so there is no chance such a portal would open.”