SWITZERLAND-SCIENCE-PARTICLE-EUROPE-CERN

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY MARIETTE LE ROUX CERN director for accelerators and technology Frederick Bordry poses on February 10, 2015 at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva. Excitement is mounting at the world's largest proton smasher, where scientists are close to launching a superpowered hunt for particles that may change our understanding of the Universe. Physicists and engineers are running the final checks on an upgrade that nearly doubled the muscle of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 unlocked the putative Higgs boson and, with it, a Nobel Prize. The two-year power boost will take experiments into a previously-inaccessible realm that resembles science fiction. AFP PHOTO / RICHARD JUILLIART (Photo credit should read Richard Juilliart/AFP via Getty Images)