CERN

CERN, international scientific organization established for the purpose of collaborative research into high-energy particle physics. Founded in 1954, the organization maintains its headquarters near Geneva and operates expressly for research of a “pure scientific and fundamental character.” Article 2 of the CERN Convention, emphasizing the atmosphere of freedom in which CERN was established, states that it “shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.” CERN’s scientific-research facilities—representing the world’s largest machines, particle accelerators, dedicated to studying the universe’s smallest objects, subatomic particles—attract thousands of scientists from around the world. Research achievements at CERN, which include Nobel Prize-winning scientific discoveries, also encompass technological breakthroughs such as the World Wide Web.

(Read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s essay on CERN and science.)

The establishment of CERN was at least in part an effort to reclaim the European physicists who had immigrated for various reasons to the United States as a result of World War II. The provisional organization, which was created in 1952 as the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, had been proposed in 1950 by the American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi at the fifth General Conference of UNESCO. Upon formal ratification of the group’s constitution in 1954, the word Organisation replaced Conseil in its name, although the organization continued to be known by the acronym of the earlier name. In the early 21st century CERN had a membership of 23 European states, in addition to several countries that maintained “associate” or “observer” status.

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CERN has the largest and most-versatile facilities of its kind in the world. The site covers more than 100 hectares (250 acres) in Switzerland and, since 1965, more than 450 hectares (1,125 acres) in France. The activation in 1957 of CERN’s first particle accelerator, a 600-megaelectron volt (MeV) synchrocyclotron, enabled physicists to observe (some 22 years after the prediction of this activity) the decay of a pi-meson, or pion, into an electron and a neutrino. The event was instrumental in the development of the theory of the weak force.

The CERN laboratory grew steadily, activating the particle accelerator known as the Proton Synchrotron (PS; 1959), which used “strong focusing” of particle beams to achieve 28-gigaelectron volt (GeV) acceleration of protons; the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR; 1971), a revolutionary design enabling head-on collisions between two intense 32-GeV beams of protons to increase the effective energy available in the particle accelerator; and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS; 1976), which featured a 7-km (4.35-mile) circumference ring able to accelerate protons to a peak energy of 500 GeV. Experiments at the PS in 1973 demonstrated for the first time that neutrinos could interact with matter without changing into muons; this historic discovery, known as the “neutral current interaction,” opened the door to the new physics embodied in the electroweak theory, uniting the weak force with the more-familiar electromagnetic force.

In 1981 the SPS was converted into a proton-antiproton collider based on the addition of an Antiproton Accumulator (AA) ring, which allowed the accumulation of antiprotons in concentrated beams. Analysis of proton-antiproton collision experiments at an energy of 270 GeV per beam led to the discovery of the W and Z particles (carriers of the weak force) in 1983. Physicist Carlo Rubbia and engineer Simon van der Meer of CERN were awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of their contribution to this discovery, which provided experimental verification of the electroweak theory in the Standard Model of particle physics. In 1992 Georges Charpak of CERN received the Nobel Prize for Physics in acknowledgment of his 1968 invention of the multiwire proportional chamber, an electronic particle detector that revolutionized high-energy physics and has applications in medical physics.

In 1989 CERN inaugurated the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider, with a circumference of almost 27 km (17 miles), which was able to accelerate both electrons and positrons to 45 GeV per beam (increased to 104 GeV per beam by 2000). LEP facilitated extremely precise measurements of the Z particle, which led to substantial refinements in the Standard Model. LEP was shut down in 2000, to be replaced in the same tunnel by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to collide proton beams at an energy of almost 7 teraelectron volts (TeV) per beam. The LHC, which extended the reach of high-energy physics experiments to a new energy plateau and thus revealed uncharted areas of study, began test operations in 2008. In 2012 CERN scientists announced that the LHC had discovered the Higgs boson, the particle that carries the Higgs field, which permeates space and endows all elementary subatomic particles with mass through its interactions with them.

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The founding mission of CERN, to promote collaboration between scientists from many different countries, required for its implementation the rapid transmission and communication of experimental data to sites all over the world. In the 1980s Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist at CERN, began work on a hypertext system for linking electronic documents and on the protocol for transferring them between computers. His system, introduced to CERN in 1990, became known as the World Wide Web, a means of rapid and efficient communication that transformed not only the high-energy physics community but also the entire world.