<div><p>Scientists have switched the world's most powerful atom-smasher to standby for two and a half months, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.</p><p>The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ended the year "in style", CERN said, achieving more than a million particle collisions in the last two weeks and accelerating proton beams to energy levels never reached before.</p><p>CERN said the LHC would be restarted in February after a short technical stop to prepare it for collisions at even higher energy levels.</p><p>"Commissioning work for higher energies will be carried out in January, along with necessary adaptations to the hardware and software of the protections systems," CERN said in a statement.</p><p>The 3.9 billion-euro (5.6 billion dollar) collider was relaunched in November after 14 months out of action because of an electrical fault.</p><p>Scientists hope to use the collider -- inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border -- to understand the origins of the universe by recreating the conditions that followed the Big Bang.</p><p>So far, the LHC has achieved collisions at an energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV), and CERN wants to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.</p><p>Before the LHC experiment, no particle accelerator had exceeded 0.98 TeV. One TeV is the equivalent to the energy of a flying mosquito.</p><p>The LHC aims to resolve physics problems including "dark matter" and "dark energy", thought to account for 96 percent of the cosmos.</p><p>The scientists' Holy Grail is to find a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=65664739&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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