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World's Largest Particle Collider is Back to Try to Solve the Mysteries of the Universe

The world's biggest particle collider has restarted today after a two-year hiatus, and it's almost twice as powerful.
Martial Trezzini/EPA

The world's largest particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has restarted after a two-year hiatus, and embarked on a three-year phase of investigations that scientists hope will solve some of the mysteries of the universe.

And we have animations as well! YouTube link for high-res video: — CMS Experiment CERN (@CMSexperiment)June 3, 2015

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC is a 16-mile long ring, buried 330 feet underground near Geneva, Switzerland. Inside this enormous ring, which straddles the border between Switzerland and France, the LHC accelerates and collides billions of protons at nearly the speed of light.

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— CMS Experiment CERN (@CMSexperiment)June 3, 2015

Particles inside the LHC collide approximately 600 million times per second, and each collision produces one million bytes of data, which is then recorded and analyzed by tens of thousands of computers throughout the world.

The LHC has been idle since February 2013, when it was shut down for maintenance work and upgrades. It was restarted in April 2015 and the collision rate has been upped progressively over the last couple of months to reach the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV — almost twice as much as the previous record of 8 TeV. In short, the LHC will now be smashing atoms with almost twice as much power as before.

The LHC experiments are back in business with record energy collisions of — CERN (@CERN)June 3, 2015

In July 2012, the CERN announced it had discovered the Higgs boson — also known as "the God particle" — a subatomic particle that perhaps holds the key to the origins of the universe. The search for the Higgs boson was one of the key reasons the super-collider was built in the first place.

Particle physics expert Bertrand Laforge said that restarting the particle collider is important because it will allow scientists to continue to test the validity of what is called the "Standard Model" of particle physics, which scientists theorize can explain the particles and forces that make up the building blocks of all the matter in the universe.

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The Higgs boson plays a unique role in the Standard Model theory, explained Laforge, because "it allows us to understand the masses of other particles."

Laforge — who works at the LHC and helped discover the Higgs boson — said that while the discovery was groundbreaking, there remained a "one in three million chance that what was observed [in 2012] is incompatible with the existence of the Higgs boson."

So while the data collected by researchers at the LCH appears to be compatible with the Standard Model, it could be that we don't completely understand the fabric of the cosmos just yet.

"There are many things that remain to be observed with regards the Higgs boson to comply with the [standard] model," said Laforge.

As part of the new phase of experiments, scientists will also investigate dark matter and the theory of "supersymmetry."

"Supersymmetry consists of establishing a link — that is assumed but has not been observed — between two different classes of particle: those that contain matter and those that encourage interactions," said Laforge.

"As for dark matter, we have suspected its existence since the 1930s, when we realized there was a discrepancy between the measured mass of galaxies and the mass that had been estimated through the standard model," the Laforge explained. "Either the standard model is wrong, or the discrepancy can be explained by something that we haven't observed yet: dark matter."

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According to NASA's estimate, there is 5 to 7 times more dark matter — so-called because it neither emits nor absorbs light — than "ordinary" matter.

"The experiments we have launched today will perhaps confirm its existence," said Laforge. "But we might also find something completely different. In that case, we'll have to say: the model doesn't work. And in that case, it will be the start of a huge amount of research, a quest to find a new model that is compatible with what we recorded."

"Perhaps we will also make new discoveries, thanks to this [new] level of energy," Laforge told VICE News Wednesday.

Follow Matthieu Jublin on Twitter: @MatthieuJublin

Watch the VICE News Documentary," Pipeline Nation: America's Broken Industry."[ooyalacontent_id="A3b2JodTq_uQj_40mZmVb7kJYmLEEkBZ"player_id="YjMwNmI4YjU2MGM5ZWRjMzRmMjljMjc5" auto_play="1" skip_ads="0"]