At 12:17 p.m. on Friday, March 30, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was switched on once again, making 2018 the seventh year that the world’s largest particle accelerator has been in operation. It is also excitingly the fourth year running now that the LHC will have achieved 13 TeV collision energy.

Over the past four months, much maintenance has been conducted on the LHC, but with the work now completed the ATLAS experiment has begun a glorious new year as the Large Hadron Collider is now back in the business of circulating proton beams, as ATLAS report.

Masaya Ishino, who is the ATLAS Run Coordinator, described the importance of the maintenance work at the LHC, with new improvements made that will help to greatly strengthen the Large Hadron Collider’s capabilities over the next year.

“During the winter shutdown, teams worked to reinforce systems across the data-taking chain: from the detector front-end to the data processing. We began system commissioning in February, readying the detector to record proton collision events with the highest instantaneous luminosity ever achieved, as is foreseen during the 2018 run.”

At the end of the LHC’s new work this year, the particle accelerator will have reached the conclusion of Run 2, and physicists are expecting great things at CERN. For one thing, more data will be extracted from the Large Hadron Collider this year when compared with 2017 and it is also hoped that the accelerator’s integrated luminosity will hit 60 inverse femtobarns in 2018.

Beams are back in the LHC – https://t.co/Zl5dm9Gvm1https://t.co/P4DNODvuaB — LHC news (@LHCnews) March 30, 2018

If you’re wondering how much work has gone into getting the LHS up and running again, the answer is quite a lot. Technically speaking, the Large Hadron Collider is the finishing point of five different machines that are all linked, and work began in earnest at the start of March so that the particle accelerator would be up and running in time.

From injecting protons into Linac2 weeks ago, followed by the same procedure with the PS Booster, the following weeks of March saw beams accepted in both the Proton Synchrotron and the Super Proton Synchrotron, according to Phys.Org.

Numerous things had to be checked at CERN before the run in 2018, especially the radiofrequency cavities, which are what cause the particles to be accelerated in the first place. But engineers also had to check the cryogenic cooling systems, magnets, power supplies, the safety installations and, finally, the vacuum system.

With the Large Hadron Collider up and running now, the first results from the particle accelerator are expected to be available sometime in May.