Engineers have been working to remedy an intermittent short-circuit in the giant magnet after two years of downtime and upgrades for the LHC, according to International Business Times (IBT). The short was caused by a metal fragment that had gotten lodged between a magnet and its diode. A high current - about 400 amps - was passed through the metal fragment, which then disintegrated.
Provided that part of the LHC passes all the circuit tests, the refitted collider is expected to restart at double the power of its previous run. The collider simulates the conditions that followed the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
CERN stated the collisions should begin again in May, according to IBT.
The Higgs boson, or "God particle," was detected in 2012, and Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for that discovery.
Recent tests from the Atlas and CMS experiments at the LHC have identified the mass of the Higgs boson and two new subatomic particles have been detected. The particle accelerator at CERN will also be used to pick up dark matter signals. Scientists believe dark matter makes up 96 percent of the universe.
