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 The world's biggest particle collider, located near Geneva, has
been undergoing a two-year refit and work is now "in full swing" to
start circulating proton beams again in March, with the first
collisions due by May, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) said on Friday.
"With this new energy level, the (collider) will open new horizons
for physics and for future discoveries," CERN Director General Rolf
Heuer said in a statement. "I’m looking forward to seeing what
nature has in store for us."
CERN's collider is buried in a 27-km (17-mile) tunnel straddling the
Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains. The entire
machine is already almost cooled to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero
in preparation for the next three-year run.
 The first run, carried out at lower power, led in 2012 to
confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson particle, which
explains how fundamental matter took on the mass to form stars and
planets.
That discovery was a landmark in physics but there are still plenty
of other mysteries to be unraveled, including the nature of "dark
matter" and "dark energy".
Latest calculations suggest that dark matter accounts for 27 percent
of the universe and dark energy, which drives galaxies apart, 68
percent, while the visible matter observed in galaxies, stars and
planets makes up just 5 percent.
Other unsolved questions include the relative lack of antimatter in
the universe, when equal amounts of matter and antimatter were
created in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and the possible
existence of other new kinds of particles.
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Many physicists favor a yet-to-be-proven theory known as
super-symmetry, in which all basic particles have a heavier but
invisible "super" partner.
Getting to grips with such issues requires deeper insights into the
building blocks of the cosmos, which researchers hope to achieve by
turning up the dial at CERN to higher energies.
"We have unfinished business with understanding the universe," said
Tara Shears, a physics professor at the University of Liverpool, who
works on one of the four main experiments at the collider.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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