This year, the atom-smasher will restart at a beam energy that is substantially higher, with the goal of better understanding why nature prefers matter to antimatter.
A new discovery "could be as early as this year... if we are really lucky," said Beate Heinemann, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, during a talk on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.
Heinemann is a member of the ATLAS research team at the LHC.
"Maybe we will find now supersymmetric matter," she added.
"For me it is more exciting than the Higgs.