After more than a year of repairs, the Large Hadron Collider located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland is back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

The ALICE detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will study the fireballs that result when energetic lead ions collide, recreating conditions like those when the universe was just a millionth of a second old. An ALICE instrument called EMCal will signal the most interesting events. Designed by an international collaboration spearheaded by scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab and other U.S. institutions, EMCal is now on its way to completion.