Situated in Geneva, Switzerland, and operated by the European research facility CERN (its name derived from the French, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The restart today (22 April) follows more than three years of upgrade work.
At 12:16 CEST, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27km ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV).
“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,” said Rhodri Jones, the head of CERN’s Beams department, “but first beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown.”
Mike Lamont, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, added: “The machines and facilities underwent major...