After a successful repair of a glitch that had delayed the restart of the Large Hadron Collider, scientists at CERN say they hope to flip the switch on the giant particle accelerator sometime this weekend.
Researchers at the European nuclear research facility near Geneva, Switzerland, expressed confidence in the readiness of the machine after dealing with a short circuit in one of its huge magnets that pushed its restart back a week, following a two-year refit and upgrade.
"We are confident of being able to restart the machine over the weekend, as all of the tests performed so far have been successful," said Frederick Bordry, CERN director of accelerators and technology.
As they continue to probe the secrets of the universe, physicists will now have the capability to drive the LHC at almost twice the energy they had in 2012, when they famously detected the Higgs boson. The discovery of the long-sought fundamental particle brought a Nobel prize to the scientists who developed the theoretical concepts predicting the Higgs boson.
In the first run of the LHC – which sent particles speeding in opposite directions and colliding around the 16-mile ring of the machine – researchers had energies of 8 trillion electron volts, or 8 TeV, to work with.
Following a two-year upgrade, the $5 billion LHC will be able to achieve energy levels of 13 TeV — high enough that physicists hope to detect new, mysterious particles that might help explain dark matter — the invisible material thought to make up more than 90 percent of the universe.
To date, what little is known – or guessed – about dark matter has been inferred from its gravitational effect on the visible galaxies and stars of the universe.
Early runs of the LHC will be tested at lower energy levels, with experiments at the full 14 TeV expected to be performed by May or June.
Researchers are hoping the "LHC 2.0" will let them peer ever more deeply into the subatomic world.
"We're standing on the threshold of a completely new view of the Universe," said particle physicist Tara Shears at the University of Liverpool in Britain.
The LHC, considered the largest single machine in the world, is a collaboration between more than 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, representing hundreds of universities and laboratories.
