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CERN's Large Hadron Collider back to operation

Xinhua, April 5, 2015 Adjust font size:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday announced the Large Hadron Collider(LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation after two years of rebuild.

CERN said in a statement that "after two years of intense maintenance and consolidation, and several months of preparation for restart, today at 10:41 am ( 09:41 GMT), a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12.27 pm ( 11:27 GMT) by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction."

CERN noted these beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV and operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams over the coming days.

"The return of beams to the LHC rewards a lot of intense, hard work from many teams of people," Paul Collier, head of CERN's Beam Department said. "It's very satisfying for our operators to be back in the driver's seat, with what's effectively a new accelerator to bring on-stream, carefully, step by step."

According to CERN, during the technical stop of the LHC over the last two years, some 10,000 electrical interconnections between the magnets were consolidated. Magnet protection systems were added, while cryogenic, vacuum and electronics were improved and strengthened.

Thanks to the work done, the LHC will operate at unprecedented energy at 6.5 TeV per beam, almost double that during the first run.

CERN said with 13 TeV proton-proton collisions expected before summer, the LHC experiments will soon be exploring uncharted territory.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, dark matter, antimatter and quark-gluon plasma are all on the menu for LHC season 2.

After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, physicists will be putting the Standard Model of particle physics to its most stringent test yet, searching for new physics beyond this well-established theory describing particles and their interactions. Endit