Cern Large Hadron Collider set to restart

By Betul Yuruk

CERN, Switzerland

The world of science is gearing up for the second three-year run of the Large Hadron Collider after a two-year technical stop.

The  27-kilometer (16.7 miles)-long particle accelerator, which straddles the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, will restart in late March, Rolf Heuer, Director General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN said on Thursday.

Heuer told a press conference in CERN headquarters near Geneva: "We are very excited. We are entering a new phase after two years of heavy maintenance, heavy improvement of the whole accelerator.

"It will start some when this month, I hope maybe in two weeks."

He also said that the LHC would run at almost double the energy of its first run.

"To restart the LHC now at a higher-energy level will hopefully open new windows for physics and for future discoveries, depending on the kindness of nature, of course," he added.

 Major breakthrough

Frederick Bordry, CERN director for accelerators, said that the collision of the two beams inside the LHC would start in late May or early June. 

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator collides high-energy beams in experiments which examine the nature of subatomic energy.

The machine detected the long-elusive Higgs boson particle, referred to as the "God particle" for its importance in understanding the nature of the cosmos, in 2012, in an outcome regarded as a major breakthrough in physics.

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on the Higgs boson theory, which describes the particle as an elementary one in the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Higgs boson was the final component whose existence was needed to confirm the Standard Model -- which explains the workings of the Universe at the smallest energy scales.