Upgraded Hadron Collider Stirs From Slumber

The Large Hadron Collider is stirring, prepping for its second three-year experiment after 16 months of revamping and upgrades. The Improved "atom smasher" will function at double its former energy level, allowing scientists to approach the next stage in studies of energy and mysterious phenomena like dark matter.

According to the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research) - commonly known as CERN - the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world is starting up for the first time since 2012. A beam was launched down the Proton Synchrotron accelerator last Wednesday, starting a complex process that will have the entire system fully operational by 2015.

"The machine is coming out of a long sleep after undergoing an important surgical operation," Frédérick Bordry, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, said in a statement. "We are now going to wake it up very carefully and go through many tests before colliding beams again early next year.

The Large Hardron Collider (LHC) is designed to push proton beams close to the speed of light - traveling in a 17-mile loop 11,000 times a second. Two such beams are traditionally launched simultaneously in opposite directions in order to recreate the instant immediately after the Big Bang. The resulting collisions, experts argue, released the energy and matter that helped make the universe what it is today.

Back in 2012, studying such a collision helped François Englert and Peter Higgs discover physical evidence of the theoretical Higgs boson particle - a fundamental aspect of the mechanism that gives particles their mass. This enormous breakthrough not only won Higgs and Englert Nobel Prizes in 2013, but also helped further physicists' understanding of the universe.

However, "the discovery of a Higgs boson was just the beginning of the LHC's journey," said senior CERN physicist Fabiola Gianotti at a press conference.

After the 2012 discovery, the collider was spun down, giving engineers time to improve its function so that it can work at double the energy of the 2012 experiment.

"The increase in energy opens the door to a whole new discovery potential," Gianotti added.

According to CERN, by being able to create collisions at energies never before seen in a particle accelerator, researchers hope to unveil some of the mysteries of the universe that remain largely unsolved and barely understood - including the existence of dark matter.

Testing of the Proton Synchrotron will begin in the coming month, and the full physics program is slated to start up again at the LHC by Spring 2015.