LONDON: The world’s largest particle smasher restarted Sunday after a two-year upgrade that will allow physicists to explore uncharted corners of what makes up the universe, including dark matter and antimatter.
“After two years of intense maintenance and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.
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“It’s fantastic to see it going so well after such a major overhaul,” CERN director-general Rolf Heuer told delighted scientists and engineers as the beams moved around the tubes – with a circumference of 27 kilometres – in the underground complex.
Experiments at the collider have been seeking to unlock clues as to how the universe came into existence by studying fundamental particles, the building blocks of all matter, and the forces that control them.
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was used to prove the existence of Higgs Boson, the particle that confers mass, earning the 2013 Nobel physics prize for two of the scientists who, back in 1964, had theorized the existence of the so-called “God particle.”
