The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced first proton collisions, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said Monday: "It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time. But we need to keep a sense of perspective — there's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program."

On Monday beams of protons started circulating in both directions around the LHC. In the next few days, the two beams, brought together to stage small collisions, will lay the groundwork for high-energy collisions that are expected to take place in January.

On Friday, the first circulating beam of protons successfully made it through the LHC's entirety.

Experiments using the LHC were suspended last September shortly after a successful start, due to a malfunction of two superconducting magnets and a subsequent helium leak into the tunnel housing the device.

The collider, located 100 meters (328 ft) under the French-Swiss border with a circumference of 27 km (17 miles), enables scientists to shoot subatomic particles round an accelerator ring at almost the speed of light, channeled by powerful fields produced by superconducting magnets.

In order to fire beams of protons round the vast underground circular device, the entire ring must be cooled by liquid helium to minus 271 degrees C, just two degrees above absolute zero.

By colliding particles in front of immensely powerful detectors, scientists hope to detect the Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle," which was hypothesized in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass. Discovering the particle could explain how matter appeared in the split-second after the Big Bang.

The international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.