Large Hadron Collider resumes its search for Dark Matter

The CERN nuclear research center has restarted the Large Hadron Collider, after a two-year hiatus during which the collider had been upgraded.

The collider, housed in an underground facility in the French-Swiss border, has been upgraded to run at a higher energy and with a greater intensity of collisions. As from this May, the accelerator is planned to be continuously run for three years, 24 hours a day.

The refit has made the collider almost twice as powerful as before, with its beam energy level now reaching 13 tera-electron volts (TeV)- hopefully powerful enough to ‘capture’ dark matter, which is believed to make up some 70 percent of matter in our universe.

The 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, was last active between 2008 and in 2012, and was crucial in the discovery of the mysterious Higgs boson subatomic particle, the so-called "God particle" that gives mass to other particles, which is believed to be the key to understanding the constructs of the universe.