CERN's LHC Back to Business After Two-Year HIatus

Two years after being shutdown, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its quest to discover mini-black holes, dark matter and more on Sunday.

According to BBC, scientists at LHC started beaming protons in both directions along the 27 km tunnel but collisions won't begin until next month. The protons are now being beamed with low energies which will gradually increase in the coming months. Particles this year are expected to collide with nearly twice the energy pumped during the collider's last leg of operations in 2013 when it found the Higgs Boson.

"After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape. But the most important step is still to come when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels," said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry.

This time around, scientists are hoping to recreate environments the universe would have witnessed moments after Big Bang, and hope to find clues to dark matter, dark energy and supersymmetry, taking physicists beyond the standard model.

"After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, physicists will be putting the Standard Model of particle physics to its most stringent test yet, searching for new physics beyond this well-established theory describing particles and their interactions," CERN said on its website.