Researchers successfully restarted the Large Hadron Collider this weekend, aiming to power the £6 billion Big Bang simulator up to record-breaking speeds.

One official said the LHC had done more in a few hours than it did in five days of operations last year. The collider is being used to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe, such us finding out if dark matter exists and why some particles have mass.

Nine days after last year’s project launch, an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel, causing damage that cost £24m to repair. Following a 14-month hiatus, on Friday night engineers fired two split-second proton beams in opposite directions around the machine’s 17-mile (27km) tunnel. The instrument is built under the French-Swiss border, underneath the city of Geneva.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.

James Gillies, a spokesman for Cern, said that if the collider continues to operate well, scientists may try to reach a record-breaking beam with energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts.

The next key milestone for the collider will be the first low-energy collisions between particle beams, which could take place next week.

Cern’s director, Steve Myers, said: “We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year”.

The Cern Twitter feed also states that an additional beam of protons, circulating anticlockwise, was introduced in the accelerator’s tunnels later yesterday, and that both streams have already completed thousands of spins inside the Collider. This is the crowning of more than a year of around-the-clock repairs on the world’s most advanced physics experiment ever. The project saw the collaboration of more than 3,000 scientists from around the world, all working together for the accelerator’s initially planned start, in September 2008.

“The LHC is up and running regularly. Operators are adjusting and testing obedient beams,” the Twitter feed added. “The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago. We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on,” added in an official statement Steve Myers. Last night’s achievement comes after more than 15 years of work on the construction, testing, and commissioning of the giant accelerator, the largest in the world.

The collider’s main goal is to discover the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that allows energy to acquire mass, which is essential in our understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.

If the LHC discovers the Higgs, it would essentially confirm that the last few decades of physics research were not in vain. The collider can achieve the energy levels required by the theoretical models on the Higg’s range. Hopes are high that the instrument will also find signs of supersymmetry, so that particle physics can move forward.

1. Replacement of 14 quadrupole magnets. 2. Replacement of 39 dipole magnets. 3. Repair of over 200 electrical connections. 4. Clean more than 4 miles from the beam pipe. 5. Installing a new system to contain some magnets. 6. Installing hundreds of new ports of helium around the machine. 7. Adding thousands of detectors to the early warning system. SOURCE: CERN