LHC Restarts Experiments in New Hunt for Dark Matter

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has officially started delivering physics data for the first time in 27 months. After an almost two-year shutdown, the LHC is now well on its way to uncovering new secrets in the world of physics.

"With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning," said Frederick Bordry, the CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology, in a news release. "It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen."

Already, the LHC operators declared "stable beams," the signal for the LHC experiments that they can start taking data. Beams are made of "trains" of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27 kilometer ring of the LHC.

"The first three-year run of the LHC, which culminated with a major discovery in July 2012, was only the start of our journey," said Rolf Heuer, CERN Director. "It is time for new physics! We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let's see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works."

Today, run 2 will begin. Physicists should be able to better explore the Standard Model and even find evidence of new physics phenomena beyond its boundaries. This could explain remaining mysteries such as dark matter.

"The collisions we are seeing today indicate that the work we have done in the past two years to prepare and improve our detector has been successful and marks the beginning of a new era of exploration of the secrets of nature," said Tiziano Camporesi, CMS spokesperson. "We can hardly express our excitement within the collaboration: this is especially true for the youngest colleagues."

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