The 174th session of the CERN Council held last week revealed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is gearing up for its second three-year run after a 2-year refit technical stop undertaken to upgrade the machine for running at almost double the energy of the LHC’s first run.

“With this new energy level, the LHC will open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “I’m looking forward to seeing what nature has in store for us”.

Having been cooled to the nominal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, the CERN Control Centre with involved teams are preparing to carry out requisite tests before circulating proton beams again in March 2015.

The largest particle accelerator in the world with a 27-kilometre superconducting machine aims to run with two proton beams in 2015, so as to produce a never-attempted 13 TeV collisions.

“After the huge amount of work done over the last two years, the LHC is almost like a new machine,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry. “Restarting this extraordinary accelerator is far from routine. Nevertheless, I’m confident that we will be on schedule to provide collisions to the LHC experiments by May 2015”.

All set to begin their final commissioning phase, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, the four large experiments of the LHC are also being prepared for the second run, and have seen upgrades on important programmes for maintenance and improvements, reported CERN.

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(Image credit: Neil Hinchley)