(Newswire.net — April 6, 2015) — After two years of recalibrating and tweaking, CERN nuclear research center has restarted the world’s largest particle collider. Last time the Hadron Collider was running, scientists discovered the ‘God’s particle’ – Higg’s Boson – that allegedly gives mass to other particles, and is believed to be the key to understanding the constructs of the universe. The new run will focus on searching for dark matter (antimatter) and trying to reach other dimensions.
One of the two beams had completed a circuit of the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets in an underground facility on the Swiss-French border, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on Sunday, Russia Today reported.
The scientists finished the two-year long upgrade to the Collider that now runs at a higher energy and with a greater intensity of collisions. The circuit of the beams is a closed course, and it should run for three years, with operators busy 24-hours a day, CERN’s scientists reported, adding they are not sure when exactly they will get the results.
“The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results, we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before,” CERN spokesperson Arnaud Marsollier said in March.
“If something interesting appears in this new window we will see it. It might be two months from now or two years, we’re not able to say. It took 50 years to find the Higgs boson and 20 years to build this machine, and it will be running at least until 2035, so we can be patient,” he added.
After the restart, relatively weak beams of protons was send through the LHC ring in opposite directions, reaching velocities close to the speed of light. However, the first collisions are likely to happen no earlier than June, and new discoveries should be expected somewhere in the middle of 2016.
With its beam energy level now reaching 13 tera-electron volts (TeV), the scientists have doubled the accelerator’s power. Now, the collider should be powerful enough to catch dark matter, the structural building block of the 70 percent of the universe, scientists believe.
CERN first scheduled firing the Collider on March 31; however, due to the technical problems it wasdelayed. Reportedly, the problem causing the delay was a small piece of metal debris in the system. It was subsequently removed and the final testing was completed.