The Large Hadron Collider will be re-launched...

"Yesterday the LHC was handed over for operation. After a couple of days of machine check-out, the operations team will be able to prepare for injection and then bring the first circulating beams in to the LHC," the CERN website said.

Experiments using the LHC were suspended last September shortly after a successful start, due to a malfunction of two superconducting magnets and a subsequent helium leak into the tunnel housing the device.

Work to repair the collider and upgrade it took over a year. In early November, a system to protect it from such accidents, named the Quench Protection System, was installed.

The collider, located 100 meters under the French-Swiss border with a circumference of 27 km, enables scientists to shoot subatomic particles round an accelerator ring at almost the speed of light, channeled by powerful fields produced by superconducting magnets.

In order to fire beams of protons round the vast underground circular device, the entire

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