The world's most powerful particle accelerator, designed to recreate the Big Bang of the universe, has been restarted after more than a year of repairs, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said on Friday.
Scientists at the organization, known as CERN, successfully established a clockwise circulating particle beam in the giant machine named Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at 10 p.m. local time ( 2100 GMT) on Friday, the organization said in a statement.
"It's great to see beam circulating in the LHC again," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "We've still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we're well on the way."
Housed in a 27-kilometer, circular tunnel at the Swiss-French border near Geneva, the LHC was designed to unlock many secrets of the universe by recreating the conditions immediately after the Big Bang which happened some 13.7 billion years ago.
The machine was first started on Sept. 10, 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.
"The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators. "We've learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That's how progress is made."
CERN scientists will finally seek to use the highly sophisticated instrument to collide two beams of particles circulating in opposite directions at close to the speed of light, so that conditions just after the Big Bang could be to a large extent recreated.
Low-energy collisions can be expected in about a week from now, said CERN, the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. |
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