|
www.cern.ch |
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the world's most prestigious research centres. Its business is fundamental physics - finding out what makes our universe work, where it came from, and where it is going.
CERN sits astride the Franco-Swiss border west of Geneva at
the foot of the Jura mountains and was founded in 1954 as one of Europe's first
joint ventures. Since then it has become a shining example of international
collaboration. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention,
membership has grown to 20 Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland and the United Kingdom).
CERN's main duty is to design, build and operate very complex machines called
particle accelerators where physicists collide minute particles of matter to
unravel the basic laws of nature. This research is purely scientific and the
results are freely available. The laboratory's accelerator complex is built
around three principal interconnected accelerators. The oldest, the Proton
Synchrotron (PS), was built in the 1950s and was briefly the world's highest
energy accelerator. The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), built in the 1970s, was
the scene of CERN's first Nobel prize in the 1980s. The Large Electron-Positron
collider (LEP), which started up in 1989, finished operation in November 2000
after contributing a very accurate study of the electronpositron collisions and
thus providing a profound knowledge of the weak interaction, one of the four
interactions in nature.
CERN is currently preparing to install a new accelerator inside the same tunnel
as LEP - a 27-kilometre underground ring - called the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). This machine will start up in 2007 giving the world's physicists a new
tool to probe deeper than ever into the heart of matter. Each of CERN's
accelerators hosts a range of experiments run by collaborations of physicists
from around the world.
Some 7,500 people of 80 nationalities representing some 500 universities pass
through CERN's gates each day to use its facilities. From material science to
computing, particle physics demands the ultimate in performance, making CERN an
important test-bed for industry.
Today everyone knows the World Wide Web, but not many know that it was invented
at CERN, conceived to give particle physicists easy access to their data
wherever they happened to be on the planet. The World-Wide Web, the Grid,
medical imaging, and advanced techniques for using electronic chips are just a
few of the many recent spinoffs from the fundamental research done at CERN.