By Hamish Johnston

The first proton beams of the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were circulated earlier today. Travelling in opposite directions around the collider at CERN in Geneva, each beam was injected at 450 GeV. If all goes well over the next few days, the energy of each beam will be increased to the operating energy of 6.5 TeV.

“After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape,” says CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “But the most important step is still to come, when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels.”

You can follow all the excitement at the LHC Dashboard, which provides information about the collider in real time. There is also much more about what physicists hope to discover during the second run in our news article “Large Hadron Collider fires up in a bid to shake up the Standard Model”.