After last year’s magnet problems which caused damage and significant delays at the experiments, LHC scientists have once again injected particle beams into the collider -thus officially resuming the operations to create a black hole that will mercilessly devour the whole planet.

As the BBC reported:

The LHC was closed down shortly after its switch-on last year, when a magnet problem called a “quench” caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into its tunnel.

Since then, engineers have been working to repair the damage. Recently, all eight sectors of the LHC were cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

Even minor damages can cause huge delays at the LHC, since engineers have to bring the magnets up to normal temperature, examine the damage, fix it, and then freeze them again -and this warming up / cooling down cycle is one very, very slow process!

Despite resuming operations, meaningful results are not within touching distance yet. And the ultimate goal of the LHC (to create a supermassive black hole of course) is still a few years down the road:

The beams were injected at 450 billion electron volts, only a fraction of the energy that scientists will aim for when they attempt to collide two particle beams.

Two beams of particles will be fired down pipes running through the magnets - travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.

Mr Arduini [Gianluigi Arduini, deputy head of hardware commissioning for the LHC] said: “The aim once the beam is circulating is to accelerate [it] up to 3.5 [trillion electron volts].

“But that will be in stages. We will first go to one, then 3.5… then from 2011 we’re going to try to go to seven.”

So don’t hold your breath waiting for the Higgs bosons or the end of the world…