Cern to restart LHC at half power

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A year after shutting down following a leak, Cern's Large Hadron Collider is set to restart in November - but only at half power.

Last week, Geneva-based research institute Cern said its most recent round of tests showed repairs were complete on the electrical connections of the particle-smashing machine.

Still, when it restarts in November, it will run at 3.5 TeV per beam - half of what it could run at.

CERN's director general Rolf Heuer said: "We've selected 3.5 TeV to start because it allows the LHC operators to gain experience of running the machine safely while opening up a new discovery region for the experiments."

After enough data is taken at that level, Cern will then boost it up to 5 TeV. More work needs to be done before ramping up to 7 TeV, so the machine will need to be shut down again first - likely towards the end of 2010 or 2011.

"The LHC is a much better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Heuer. "We can look forward with confidence and excitement to a good run through the winter and into next year."

The LHC started up last September, but a helium leak shut it down just a few weeks later.

In addition to being one of the biggest science experiments in the world, it's also a massive computing project - click here to find out more about the tech behind the LHC.

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