The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. And after two years of maintenance and upgrading, the LHC is ready again to explore some of the unsolved questions in physics. Marjorie Shapiro, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a collaborator at the LHC, says it's now capable of smashing protons at almost twice the energy as before.

"The purpose of the two-year shutdown was to go back in and retrofit the magnets, making the corrections that they needed to make in the power lines, so that they could safely increase the current, in those magnets to get more magnetic field, which will allow us to accelerate the protons to higher energy."

Shapiro says that they will be able to produce new particles made in the early universe that were not possible until the upgrades.

"So if you have higher energy protons that means, you can create heavier stuff. So we’re going to be able to look for particles that we couldn’t create in the last run because they were too heavy to make."