CERN's Revamped 'Large Hadron Collider' Smashes First Photons After 2 Year Break

The world’s largest particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHR), has finally smashed photons together after a two year repair and maintenance program, the European physics lab CERN said.

Low energy collisions took place on Tuesday, at an energy of just 450 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) per beam. This will allow the scientists to fine tune the LHR as they raise the power up to 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) next month.

“It’s a nice milestone today. There were a lot of smiling faces in the control room,” Dave Charlton, spokesperson for the LHC’s huge multipurpose Atlas detector, told the Guardian .... http://rt.com