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Large Hadron Collider set to go at double power in 2015

The collider is buried deep underground below the Swiss-French border CERN

After a two-year break the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is located on the outskirts of Geneva, is on target to re-start in March 2015. It’ll be turned back on at nearly double its previous power level and should be ready for atom-smashing experiments by May.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday that all of its teams are hard at work ensuring that the LHC will be set to go again next year as planned.

The 27km-long particle accelerator is close to being cooled to the necessary temperature of “1.9 degrees above absolute zero”.

The CERN Control Centre has a number of tests it has to carry out before the LHC can be said to be fully set to go.

Once the machine has been restarted it will run for three years while scientists use it to try and unravel many of the universe’s unsolved mysteries.

In its last run the LHC operated at an energy level of 8 TeV (tera electron volts), the overall level for the 2015-2018 run will be 13 TeV.

It was at CERN in 2012 where researchers discovered evidence of the elusive subatomic Higgs boson particle, without which particles would not hold together and there would be no matter.

This discovery proved theories by British scientist Peter Higgs to be correct and helped him to win the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.

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