Atom smasher up and running again

Scientists switched on the world's largest atom smasher for the first time since the $10 billion dollar machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago.

It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late yesterday in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.

Circulation of the beams was a significant leap forward.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments - probably starting in January - regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.

Progress on restarting the machine, on the border between Switzerland and France, went faster than expected last Friday and the first beam circulated in a clockwise direction around the machine at about 10 p.m. local time, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

"Some of the scientists had gone home and had to be called back in," Mr Gillies said.

The exact time of the start of the Large Hadron Collider was difficult to predict because it was based on how long it took to perform steps along the way, and in the end it happened about nine hours earlier than expected, Mr Gillies said.

This is an important milestone on the road toward scientific discoveries at the LHC, which are expected in 2010, he said.