HARROW: After undergoing upgrades over the last two years, the world’s biggest and most powerful physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, was powered back up on April 5, 2015.
The LHC is a particle collider, and is the single largest machine in the world. It took ten years to build and went online for the first time in 2008. During its first “season” it discovered the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that makes up the Higgs field. The presence of the field explains why some fundamental particles have mass. In 2013, it was shut down to undergo upgrades.
On April 5 at 10:41 a.m. local time in Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC fired a proton particle in its 17 mile circumference magnetic ring followed by a second particle in the opposite direction at 12:27 p.m.
According to a press release by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, the particles were circulated at an injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts, and over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing the energy of the particles.
An electronvolt is the amount of energy gained by a single unbound proton or electron when it is accelerated through an electric or magnetic field. For comparison, a AA battery gives an electron about 1.5 electronvolts of energy. The full power of the upgraded LHC has an energy of 13 trillion electronvolts.
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