- Category: Science & Technology
By Paul Rincon - Science reporter, BBC NewsParticle smasher restarts - LHC tunnel (Cern/M.Brice) The LHC's tunnel runs for 27km under the Franco-Swiss border.
Researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they are delighted with the progress made since the machine restarted on Friday.
One official said the collider had done more in a few hours than it did in five days of operations
last year.
The LHC is being used to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.
Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, it is the world's largest machine.
During the experiment, scientists will search
for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.
It's all been pretty positive so far... Now, [the team] is knuckling down to the hard work James Gillies, Cern.
The machine was heavily damaged when an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel just nine days after it was first launched in September last year.
During 14 months of repairs dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate particles at the speed of light had to be replaced...MORE...
AND THIS UPDATE ARTICLE - November 23, 2009:
Big Bang atom smasher sends beams in 2 directions
Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images - Scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, during the restart of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.
