Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The world’s biggest particle collider resumed operations after an electrical fault caused a 14-month delay in the search for the universe’s missing mass.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circuit that runs under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, succeeded in setting up a clockwise circulating beam at 10 p.m. last night, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said in an e-mailed statement late yesterday.

A faulty electrical connection forced scientists to turn off the 6 billion Swiss-franc ($5.9 billion) collider days after it started on Sept. 10, 2008, according to the agency, known by its French acronym, CERN. The operating temperature of minus 271 degrees Celsius (minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit) was reached again last month, it said.

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in the statement. First results are expected next year, CERN said.

The LHC will give physicists a chance to explore the makeup of some of the matter that went missing 13.7 billion years ago in the “Big Bang.” The facility creates an environment that resembles conditions one-thousandth of a millionth of a second after the creation of all of the universe’s building matter.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers, said in the statement. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Verschuur in Zurich pverschuur@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 21, 2009 07:39 EST