London, November 30 (ANI): The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has said that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), popularly known as the ‘big bang machine’, has set a world record by accelerating to energy levels that had never been previously reached.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the previous world record was set by a the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2001, when it reached 0.98 TeV.

“CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has today become the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning,” said the organisation.

CERN wants to ultimately achieve maximum power of 7.0 teraelectronvolts or trillion electronvolts in its bid to replicate the big bang that started the universe.

Scientists are looking to the collider - inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva - to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

The LHC was relaunched on November 20, after breaking down nine days after it was started with great fanfare in September 2008.

By next year, the LHC should be ramped up to 3.5 teraelectronvolts, reaching “close to five” teraelectronvolts in the second half of next year, according to scientists.

“With 3.5 TeV, we can open new windows into physics. That can already happen next year,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete, at a cost of 3.9 billion euros.

The massive experiment aims to resolve physics enigmas such as an explanation for “dark matter” and “dark energy” that account for 96 percent of the cosmos and whether other dimensions exist parallel to our own.

It could also prove the existence of the Higgs Boson, known as the “God Particle”, which would explain how particles acquire mass. (ANI)