CERN's large hadron collider to restart this month

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would restart in the final week of March, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

The LHC, running for 27 km in a circular tunnel of superconducting magnets, 100 metres beneath the ground, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, which straddles the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

Inside the accelerator, a couple of high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide.

CERN noted that Run 2 of the LHC followed a two-year technical stop that prepared the machine for running at almost double the energy of the first run.

After substantial consolidation and improvements, the LHC will restart at an energy of 6.5 TeV per beam and collisions at a total energy of 13 TeV are expected in late spring.

The LHC started on September 10, 2008 and on March 30, 2010, the first collisions between two 3.5 TeV beams took place, setting the record for the highest-energy man-made particle collisions.

The first long shutdown of the collider started in March, 2013, to prepare it for higher energy and luminosity.

During the LHC's first run, it discovered the Higgs boson, proving that the fundamental particle created the origins of mass.

"The new energy-level will enable us to look for heavier particles with three times more mass than we found before," Andrey Golutvin, a LHC experimental physicist said in a press conference.

He added that at the higher energies, physicists would be able to detect the Higgs-Boson much more often.

"After discovering the Higgs-Boson, now it is very important to improve the accuracy of the measurements, to better understand the parameters of that particle," he said.