Large Hadron Collider returns to action following upgrade

Geneva, Apr 22 (EFE).- The Large Hadron Collider relaunched Friday following a three year pause for upgrade work, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.

Operations at the pioneering facility in Switzerland got underway with two proton beams traveling around the LHC’s 27-kilometer ring, located 80 meters below ground, at an injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV), CERN said in a statement.

“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,” the head of CERN’s beams department Rhodri Jones said.

“But first beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown.”

Mike Lamont, Cern’s director of accelerators and technology, added: “The LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation programme and will now operate at an even higher energy and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, it will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments.”

The relaunch of the LHC marks the start of a four-year data collection period that will begin in the summer.

Once up and running correctly, the energy levels in the collider will be raised to a new record of 13.6 billion electronvolts.EFE

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