Last night we passed another milestone in the continuing adventure of the Large Hadron Collider.

Quick update, the story so far: after a very successful first running period (2009-2012) – in which amongst other things the Higgs boson was discovered – the LHC was shut down for maintenance and upgrades, and a planned restart this year at even higher energies.

At Easter we got the first beams back again, albeit at low energies and not colliding.

Then in early April the beams were accelerated to the new target energy, but still not brought into collision.

Then in early May we got the first collisions for two years, though back at low energy. Some new bits of the detectors were also tried out for the first time.

Now, we have first collisions with the new high energy (13 Tera electronVolts compared to 8 TeV in 2012). There is a description here of what is going on now. I work on the ATLAS experiment, but for the sake of variety and fairness, the image above is from our rivals at CMS. By following the link you’ll can see pictures from the other detectors too – we all got them!

We expect these collisions to become “routine” early in June, when we can start exploring the new areas of physics to which they will give us access. It makes sense to think of the LHC as the world’s most powerful microscope, studying the structure of nature at the smallest distances we’ve ever seen. Turning up the energy is the equivalent of turning up the power on that microscope – and we are eager to see what that might reveal!

Jon Butterworth has written a book about the LHC and the Higgs discovery, Smashing Physics, available in Canada the US as “Most Wanted Particle”. Other events where you might be able to hear him talk about it are listed here. Also, Twitter.