Large Hadron Collider ready to restart

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) says it expects to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by this weekend after more than a year of repairs. The 27 km (17 mi) particle accelerator was launched last year, but suffered a failure from a faulty electrical connection, damaging 53 of the smasher's 9,300 superconducting magnets. Repairs are now completed, and the plan is to begin injecting protons into the LHC this weekend, on the path to search for particles such as predicted-yet-unobserved Higgs Boson. Collected below are some photographs of the repairs, and of the LHC and some of its experiments in various stages of construction. (30 photos total)

Combining two major ATLAS inner detector components. The semiconductor tracker is inserted into the transition radiation tracker for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. These make up two of the three major components of the inner detector. They will work together to measure the trajectories produced in the proton-proton collisions at the centre of the detector when the LHC is switched on. Photo taken on February 22nd, 2006. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart