Smashing particles and popping champagne corks at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back. Scientists are again firing proton beams at nearly the speed of light around its 27-kilometre loop as they resume their search for clues to the origins of the universe.

After three years of maintenance work, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, located at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, has started its third operational cycle, officials said this week. The increased amount of energy used this time is expected to lead to greater precision and discovery potential than ever before.

This month also marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, a long-sought fundamental particle that gives mass to other subatomic components of the universe.

Just before the LHC relaunch, Swiss television SRF visited CERN and got a glimpse of one of the four huge particle experiments deep underground, as well as the lab’s operational centre and its huge data centre.