The world's largest particle accelerator will restart at half power in November, physicists in Switzerland announced Thursday. The giant machine broke down last fall, putting the field of high-energy physics on hold.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is located at CERN, Europe's premier particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The massive machine is nearly 17 miles around and designed to smash ordinary protons together at near the speed of light.
Physicists hope that the debris from those collisions will provide evidence of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps to endow other particles with mass. It could also reveal things such as extra dimensions in the universe or dark matter — a mysterious form of matter that is believed to help hold galaxies together.
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