Geneva: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will restart for its second 3-year run in March 2015 that will see the world's most powerful particle accelerator double its collisional energy.
The LHC, which is managed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), is on a 2-year break from smashing particles to undergo an upgrade.
According to a senior researcher at the LHC, a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson.
This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino.
Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter" which could give important insights into the mysteries of the universe.
"It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky," said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC.
"We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter."
(With Agency inputs)
