After a two-year shutdown for power boost upgrades, the world's largest particle collider is now beginning to circulate beams of protons. And in a few weeks, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to unravel the mysteries of the universe through particle physics.

According to Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN that operates the LHC, the beam went smoothly through the whole machine. After two years of major overhaul, it's definitely fantastic to see the LHC back again, he said.

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The LHC control team will be sending more waves of protons in both directions in a 27 kilometer ring found 300 feet underground near Geneva. In the upcoming days, the team will increase the energy of these proton beams to smash particles inside the LHC's detectors.

The LHC is the world's most powerful particle collider and the most expensive at US $10 billion.

On its first run of experiments from 2009 to 2013, the collider discovered the "God Particle" or the Higgs boson and proved its existence first posited in a 1960s theory. The Higgs boson is believed to impart mass to all other fundamental particles and is apparently the last missing piece in the Standard Model, which is the guiding theory in particle physics.

Proton beams travel in the LHC at the speed of light with the help of powerful magnets frozen to a frigid temperature of absolute zero. Last week, however, one of the magnets suffered from an intermittent short circuit. Engineers were able to immediately repair this glitch to get the magnets to "restart" this Sunday.

On its first run, the LHC's collisions released a top energy level of 8 trillion volts. On the second run, the power boost will drive the machine to function at 13 trillion volts, which is close to the machine's maximum design capacity.

According to Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist from Fermilab, people want to know if the LHC can be cranked up to higher energies and this will be the biggest leap in energy we'll have during this lifetime.

Cosmic rays found in deep space are certainly more powerful than 13 trillion volts but this study of energy collisions is a hallmark for humankind under controlled conditions on Earth.

The LHC can now unravel the mysteries of the universe, including parallel universes and dark matter and even a new breed of supersymmetric particles. LHC physicists are now eager to discover these in a span of a few months.

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