Quick facts
- Founded
- 29 September 1954
- Location
- Franco-Swiss border near Geneva
- Key Facility
- Large Hadron Collider (27 km circumference superconducting tunnel)
- Collaborating Scientists
- >17,500 researchers from over 110 nationalities
- Major Discovery
- Higgs Boson (confirmed July 2012)
International Collaboration & Particle Physics
Founded in 1954 by twelve European nations to rebuild fundamental physics research in post-war Europe, CERN operates the world's most sophisticated scientific instrumentation. Its primary mandate is discovering the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces governing the universe.
CERN's flagship accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), accelerates beams of protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light within a 27-kilometer subterranean ring of superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium to 1.9 Kelvin (-271.3°C), colder than deep outer space.
Core Accelerators & Detector Experiments
- Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
- 27 km underground synchrotron colliding protons at 13.6 TeV center-of-mass energy.
- ATLAS & CMS
- Two general-purpose multi-ton detectors that independently observed the Higgs Boson in 2012.
- ALICE
- Specialized heavy-ion detector studying quark-gluon plasma, replicating matter microseconds after the Big Bang.
- LHCb
- Experiment investigating the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in bottom quark decays.
Historical Milestones & Breakthroughs
- 29 September 1954CERN Convention Ratified
Official establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research by 12 founding member states.
- 1983Discovery of W and Z Bosons
Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer lead UA1/UA2 experiments confirming electroweak unification (Nobel Prize 1984).
- March 1989Invention of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee proposes the Web at CERN to solve global document sharing among particle physicists.
- 30 April 1993Web Code Released to Public Domain
CERN directors sign the historic document ensuring the Web remains free and royalty-free forever.
- 10 September 2008First Beam Circulated in LHC
The Large Hadron Collider begins operations in the 27 km underground tunnel.
- 4 July 2012Observation of the Higgs Boson
ATLAS and CMS announce the discovery of the scalar boson responsible for the Brout-Englert-Higgs mass mechanism.
Official References & Scientific Reports
Foundational diplomatic treaty establishing CERN.
Discovery paper confirming the scalar Higgs boson.
Forest Trails
- Birthplace Of
- Employed
