On Tuesday at 9:00 Central European Time and after two years of repairs, proton collisions began again at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The first collisions, as reported by CERN, were carried out experimentally at low energy (450 gigaelectronvolts or GeV per beam), i.e. a total of 900 GeV.
Scientists and engineers hope to discover whether the Higgs boson is unique or part of a larger family of particles, whether supersymmetric particles exist, or some other particle related to dark matter.
While the accelerator currently continues with billions of collisions, the LHC, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb detectors located along its entire length (27 kilometers) are on standby to collect and analyze the data produced.
So with the LHC under operation, the team of scientists is checking everything, trying to confirm that the system and algorithms will function fully and without errors, bugs or failures when the collisions begin at 13 TeV.
Scientists report that we will have very high-energy particle collisions in June and if all goes well, the accelerator is expected to gradually reach the maximum energy it can use, i.e. around 6.5 TeV per beam or a total of 13 TeV.
