World's Most Powerful Particle Accelerator, LHC, Restarts After Two Years

The world's most powerful particle accelerator has started up once more. After two years of upgrades and repairs, proton beams once again circulated around the Large Hadron Collider.

More than 1,700 U.S. scientists who work on LHC experiments are preparing to join thousands of international colleagues to study the highest-energy particle collisions ever achieved in the lab. The collisions, which include hundreds of millions of them every second, may tell scientists a bit more about the realm of physics, and may even reveal a bit more about mysterious dark matter.

One of the highlights of LHC's first run, which began in 2009, was the discovery of the Higgs boson.

"The Higgs discovery was one of the most important scientific achievements of our time," said James Siegrist, U.S. Department of Energy's Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics, in a news release. "With the LHC operational again, at even higher energies, the possibilities for new discoveries are endless, and the United States will be at the forefront of those discoveries."

During this second run, particles will collide at a staggering 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which is 60 percent higher than any accelerator has achieved before. The LHC's four major particle detectors will collect and analyze data from these collisions, allowing them to probe new areas of research that were previously unattainable.

"We are on the threshold of an exciting time in particle physics: the LHC will turn on with the highest energy beam ever achieved," said Fleming Crim, National Science Foundation Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. "This energy regime will open the door to new discoveries about our universe that were impossible as recently as two years ago."

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