Large Hadron Collider restarts after two-year refit

The Large Hadron Collider has been restarted today, giving scientists the hope that they will gain a "better understanding of the physics underlying the universe" as they try to find out more about dark matter.

Working by accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light, and then colliding them inside collectors, the machine enables scientists to examine the debris of the collisions to find hints of new particles and new physics.

ITV News' Science Correspondent Alok Jha reports:

A visual representation of a Large Hadron Collider splash event has been tweeted by CERN's CMS Experiment team.

According to CERN, a splash event occurs when "shutters used to absorb particles that go off-axis, can be put in the path of the beam...Doing this when (the) beam is circulating essentially turns the LHC into a fixed-target experiment, showering the detectors with particles."

It was smiles all round in the control centre at CERN as the first beam makes it through the first of the Large Hadron Collider's seven sectors.

The "Big Bang" Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been restarted after a two-year refit of its machinery and wiring scientists at Europe's nuclear research centre CERN have said.

Any new discoveries it makes are unlikely to emerge until mid-2016.