CERN Large Hadron Collider Gears Up for March 2015

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine that has allowed particle physicists to make some startling discoveries, is gearing up for action once more. CERN announced at the 174^th session of the CERN Council that the LHC will be starting its second three-year run in 2015.

The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world-and it shows. The entire construction extends for 27 kilometers and has now almost cooled to its nominal operation temperature of 1.9 degrees above zero. Currently, scientists are working her to get the LHC back online, and CERN Control Center is in full swing to carry out all of the requested test before circulating proton beams again in March 2015.

The new operations are beginning after the LHC has a 2-year technical stop. This pause in research prepared the machine for running at almost double the energy of the LHC's first run.

"With this new energy level, the LHC will open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries," said Rolf Heuer, the CERN director-general, in a news release. "I'm looking forward to seeing what nature has in store for us."

Over the last two years, an extraordinary amount of work has been conducted on the machine. And for the first time on 9 December 2014, the magnets of one sector of the LHC were successfully powered to the level needed for beams to reach 6.5 TeV, which is the operating energy for the next run.

The current goal for 2015 is to run with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions, which is an energy never achieved by any accelerator in the past. Currently, the scientists plan to have the LHC fully back online by March 2015.

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