Russian scientists have claimed that time travel could take place this year as an inadvertent by-product of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run by Cern.

Mathematicians Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich said that when the LHC begins to smash atoms into each other the conditions will be perfect to open a wormhole into the distant future.

"Proton-proton collisions at the LHC could lead to the formation of time machines (space-time regions with closed time-like curves) which violate causality," said the scientists in a research paper.

"One model for the time machine is a traversable wormhole. We argue that the traversable wormhole production cross section at the LHC is of the same order as the cross section for black hole production."

The other possibility, according to the mathematicians, is that miniature black holes will be formed under the French and Swiss countryside.

However, if the time machine hypothesis is correct we will not be seeing visitors from the future because the wormholes will be barely larger than atoms.

The LHC is the world's largest scientific instrument, consisting of a 27km loop 100 metres under the French and Swiss countryside. It is due to go live later this year.