CERN restarts Large Hadron Collider in quest to unlock origins of the universe

Scientists at the European Council for Nuclear Research restarted the Large Hadron Collider on Friday, more than three years after the world's most powerful particle accelerator was paused for maintenance and upgrades.

The first beams of protons began spinning in opposite directions, marking the start of what is expected to be four years of data gathering in the search for dark matter, according to CERN.

The collider works by smashing particles together to allow scientists to study what's inside. Data collection is expected to begin in the summer after ramping up the energy and intensity of the beams.

"These beams circulated at injection energy and contained a relatively small number of protons. High-intensity, high-energy collisions are a couple of months away," Rhodri Jones, head of CERN's Beams department said.

"But first beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown."

The third run of the 16-mile-long collider, which was launched in 2008, is expected to produce collisions at record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts and in record numbers, thanks to extensive upgrades. This will allow physicists from around the world to study the Higgs boson in detail.

The Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle," is an elusive subatomic particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 that scientists believe may be a fundamental building block of the universe.

Experiments during the third run of the Large Hadron Collider will test the standard model of particle physics and improve understanding of cosmic-ray physics and a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, which was existed at the time of the Big Bang.

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