During it’s last run, researchers used CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to find the Higgs boson particle. Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God Particle’ is believed to be a fundamental building block of the universe and responsible for all matter having mass. It is also the smallest known particle and exists for only one septillionth or 0.000000000000000000000001 of a second.

Now, after two years of downtime an upgraded, more powerful LHC is getting ready to power up again in the hope of unraveling more of the universe’s mysteries.

At the 174th session of the CERN council it was announced that the LHC has reached its optimal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero. All teams are currently hard at work to complete necessary tests before bringing the 27-kilometre long, superconductor back online in March.

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

During the LHC’s downtime the magnets in one section of the collider, measuring one-eighth of the ring, were upgraded so that beams could reach 6.5 terra electron volts (TeV). TeV is a unit of measure used in particle physics.

According to Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist formerly of Harvard and Rutgers University “If an electron moves from one terminal of a nine-volt battery to the other, its motion energy will increase by nine electron-volts.”

A terra electron-volt is a trillion electron-volts. So, the team at the LHC is hoping to achieve speeds of 6.5 trillion electron volts. Additionally, if a particle left each side of a 9-volt battery at the same time and collided in the middle the collision would occur at 18 electron volts. In 2015 LHC researchers are hoping to achieve proton beam collisions at 13 TeV, which has never been achieved by any accelerator.

“After the huge amount of work done over the last two years, the LHC is almost like a new machine. 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,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry.

Four large experiments are currently being prepared for run 2 of the LHC.

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is an international collaboration involving nearly 2,000 researchers. The ALICE experiment will attempt to better understand the early universe. The researchers will attempt to discover what happens to matter when it is superheated in the heart of a star, why protons weigh so much more than the quarks that they are made of and whether or not those quarks can be freed from protons.

ATLAS is a general purpose detector at the LHC involving more than 3000 physicists from 38 countries. ATLAS investigates a wide range of subjects from the Higgs boson to dark matter and extra dimensions. The 7000 ton, 150 foot long, 82 foot high 82 foot wide ATLAS detector is the largest particle detector ever constructed. A virtual tour of ATLAS is available at Atlas.ch.

Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is another large detector designed to study the reaction of particles during high energy collisions. Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) studies the beauty quark or b quark in an effort to better understand matter and anti-matter.

While the CERN LHC is gearing up for a second run, China is looking into building an even larger supercollider and interested in the abandoned US Superconducting Super Collider, located in Texas, is seeing renewed interest.