After a winter maintenance break, Europe's Large Hadron Collider went back into operation this weekend, beginning a marathon that scientists hope will lead to theory-twisting breakthroughs.

Argonne National Laboratory's Thomas LeCompte, who is physics coordinator for the LHC's ATLAS detector, said the particle accelerator resumed shooting proton beams around its 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring on Saturday night. James Gillies, a spokesman for Europe's CERN nuclear research center, told me that proton-on-proton collisions could resume within a week.

During the next two years, the underground particle accelerator could produce data pointing to the nature of dark matter, or the discovery of a whole new class of unanticipated subatomic curiosities, or the existence of extra dimensions ... or the presence of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" that could explain why some particles have mass and others don't.

"By the end of next year, we hope very much that we will be able to say something about the Higgs," said Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at Europe's CERN nuclear research center.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/20/6095848-big-bang-machine-revs-up-again