The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) restarted the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Friday after it was stopped for upgrades at the end of 2018.  

On its website, CERN wrote, "The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator has restarted after a break of more than three years for maintenance, consolidation, and upgrade work. Today, 22 April, at 12:16 CEST [10:16 GMT], two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometre [16.7 miles] ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV)."

CERN's director for accelerators and technology, Mike Lamont, stated that the major improvements made to the LHC would deliver "even higher energy" and "significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments."  

CERN added that experts would continue the work "to progressively recommission the machine and safely ramp up the energy and intensity of the beams before delivering collisions to the experiments at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (13.6 TeV)," which will allow for more particle collisions during physics runs. This, in turn, will allow the study of "the Higgs boson in great detail and put the Standard Model of particle physics and its various extensions to the most stringent tests yet." 

The LHC, considered the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is located beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva and was built by CERN in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists. It was first launched in September 2008.