GENEVA, May 6. /TASS/. The Large Hadron Collider has smashed first proton beams after two-year maintenance, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the giant subterranean particle accelerator, said on Wednesday.

Arnaud Marsollier said that the collisions began on Tuesday morning calling it an important step towards preparing the accelerator for experiments which are expected to start in late May or early June.

"So just as the LHC team tests each component, system, and algorithm one after the other, the experiments go through checklists that confirm that everything is fully functional and no mistakes, bugs or failures are present," the spokesman said adding that the smasher was in a perfect shape.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) first started up in 2008 is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

In July 2012, several months before the collider was shut down, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the long-theorized particle that is thought to confer mass onto matter. The discovery earned the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics for Edinburgh-based physicist Peter Higgs from the United Kingdom and Belgium's Francois Englert.