CERN

Encyclopedia : C : CE : CER : CERN

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The Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (English: European Organization for Nuclear Research), commonly known as CERN, pronounced [sɜːɹn] (or [sɛrn] in French), is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated just west of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. It is also known for being the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The convention establishing it was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states.

Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them. The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.

CERN currently employs just under 3000 people full-time. Some 6500 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.

The laboratory's worldwide fame increased slightly after it was used in the opening scenes of Dan Brown's worldwide bestselling novel Angels and Demons. (CERN maintains a [fact or fiction] page regarding its portrayal in the book.) Members of the public are welcome to visit the Microcosm exhibition centre during office hours, and guided visits to actual working detectors are also available at certain times in several languages.

CERN acronym

The acronym originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. [link] According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is ... ."

Scientific achievements

Several important achievements in particle physics have been made using experiments at CERN. These include, but are not limited to:

• The discovery of neutral currents in 1973 at the Gargamelle bubble chamber.
• The discovery of W and Z bosons in 1983 at the UA1 and UA2 experiments.

The 1984 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for the latter.

The 1992 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Georges Charpak "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber".

Current accelerator complex

CERN operates a network of six accelerators and a decelerator. Each machine in the chain increases the energy of particle beams before delivering them to experiments or to the next more powerful accelerator. Currently active machines are:

• Two linear accelerators generating low energy particles for injection into the Proton Synchrotron. One is for protons and the other for heavy ions. These are known as Linac2 and Linac3 respectively.
• The PS Booster, which increases the energy of particles generated by the linear accelerators before they are transferred to the other accelerators.
• The 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron (PS) built 1959 and still operating as a feeder to the more powerful SPS.
• The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a circular accelerator with a diameter of 2 kilometres built in a tunnel, which started operation in 1976. It was designed to deliver an energy of 300 GeV and was gradually upgraded to 450 GeV. As well as having its own beamlines for fixed-target experiments, it has been operated as a proton-antiproton collider, and for accelerating high energy electrons and positrons which were injected into the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). From 2007 onwards, it will inject protons and heavy ions into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
• The On-Line Isotope Mass Separator (ISOLDE), which is used to study unstable nuclei. Particles are initially accelerated in the PS Booster before entering ISOLDE. It was first commissioned in 1967 and was rebuilt with major upgrades in 1974 and 1992.
• The Antiproton Decelerator (AD), which reduces the velocity of antiprotons to about 10% the speed of light for research into antimatter.

The accelerator of the future: the LHC

Most of the activities at CERN are currently directed towards building a new collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments for it, due to start operation in 2007. This will use the 27 km circumference circular tunnel previously occupied by LEP which was closed down in November 2000, and the PS/SPS complex to pre-accelerate protons which will be injected into it.

The tunnel is located 100 metres underground, in the region between the Geneva airport and the nearby Jura mountains. Five experiments (CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, [TOTEM] and [ALICE]) are currently being built, and will be running on the collider; each of them will study particle collisions under a different point of view, and with different technologies. Construction for these experiments needed an extraordinary engineering effort. Just as an example, to lower the pieces for the CMS experiment into the underground cavern which will host it, a special crane will have to be rented from Belgium, which will be able to lift the almost 2000 tonnes of each piece. The first of the approximately 5,000 magnets necessary for construction was lowered down a special shaft at 13:00 GMT on 7 March 2005.

This accelerator will generate vast quantities of computer data, which CERN will stream to laboratories around the world for distributed processing. In April 2005, a trial successfully streamed 600MB per second to seven different sites across the world. If all the data generated by the LHC is to be analysed, then scientists must achieve triple this before 2007.

Decommissioned accelerators

• The original linear accelerator (Linac1).
• The 600 MeV Synchro-Cyclotron (SC) which started operation in 1957 and was shut down in 1991.
• The Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), an early collider built from 1966 to 1971 and operated until 1984.
• The Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which operated from 1989 to 2000 and was the largest machine of its kind, housed in a 27 km-long circular tunnel which is now being used to build the LHC.
• The Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), commissioned in 1982, which assembled the first pieces of true antimatter, in 1995, consisting of nine atoms of antihydrogen. It was closed in 1996, and superseded by the Antiproton Decelerator.

CERN sites

The smaller accelerators are located on the main Meyrin site (also known as the West Area), which was originally built in Switzerland alongside the French border but has been extended to span the border since 1965. The French side is under Swiss jurisdiction and so there is no obvious border within the site, apart from a line of marker stones. There are six entrances to the Meyrin site:

• A, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel at specific times.
• B, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel 24/7. Often referred to as the main entrance
• C, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel at specific times.
• D, in Switzerland. Open for goods reception at specific times.
• E, in France. Open for French-resident CERN personnel at specific times. Controlled by customs personnel.
• Tunnel entrance, in France. Open for equipment transfer to and from CERN sites in France by personnel with a specific permit. This is the only permitted route for such transfers. Under the CERN treaty, no taxes are payable when such transfers are made. Controlled by customs personnel.

The SPS and LEP/LHC tunnels are located underground almost entirely outside the main site, and are mostly buried under French farmland and invisible from the surface. However they have surface sites at various points around them, either as the location of buildings associated with experiments or other facilities needed to operate the colliders such as cryogenic plants and access shafts. The experiments themselves are located at the same underground level as the tunnels at these sites.

Three of these experimental sites are in France, with ATLAS in Switzerland, although some of the ancillary cryogenic and access sites are in Switzerland. The largest of the experimental sites is the Prévessin site, also known as the North Area, which is the target station for non-collider experiments on the SPS accelerator. Other sites are the ones which were used for the UA1, UA2 and the LEP experiments (the latter which will be used for LHC experiments).

Outside of the LEP and LHC experiments, most are officially named and numbered after the site where they were located. For example, NA32 was an experiment looking at the production of charmed particles and located at the Prévessin (North Area) site while WA22 used the BEBC bubble chamber at the Meyrin (West Area) site to examine neutrino interactions. The UA1 and UA2 experiments were considered to be in the Underground Area, i.e. situated underground at sites on the SPS accelerator.

Computer Science and CERN

The World Wide Web began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Based on the concept of hypertext, the project was aimed at facilitating sharing information among researchers. The first website went on-line in 1991. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone. A copy of the original first webpage, created by Berners-Lee, is kept [here].

Prior to the Web's development, CERN had been a pioneer in the introduction of Internet technology in Europe, beginning in the early 1980s. A short history of this period can be found [here].

More recently, CERN has become a centre for the development of Grid computing, hosting among others the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and LHC Computing Grid projects. It also hosts the CERN Internet Exchange Point (CIXP), one of the two main Internet Exchange Points in Switzerland.

Member States

The original CERN signatories were:

• Belgium,
• Denmark,
• Germany (then West Germany),
• France,
• Greece,
• Italy,
• Norway,
• Sweden,
• Switzerland,
• The Netherlands,
• The United Kingdom,

Yugoslavia.

Since then:

• Austria joined in 1959
• Yugoslavia left in 1961.
• Spain joined in 1961, left in 1969 and rejoined in 1983
• Portugal joined in 1985
• Finland and Poland joined in 1991
• Hungary joined in 1992
• Czech Republic and Slovakia joined in 1993
• Bulgaria joined in 1999

Bringing the current number of member countries to 20. Additionally 8 entities (international organizations or countries) have "observer status". These are the European Commission, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, Turkey, UNESCO and the USA.

Public exhibits

Facilities at CERN open to the public include:

• The Globe of Science and Innovation, which recently opened and is used four times a week for special exhibits.
• The Microcosm museum on particle physics and CERN history.

In fiction

• CERN played an important part in Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons.
• It was also a prominent location in Robert J. Sawyer's novel ''Flashforward.
• CERN was mentioned in asides in Cliff Stoll's novel The Cuckoo's Egg.

External links

• [Official site]
• [CERN at 50]
• [CERN chronology]
• [CERN Visits]
• [Hands-On-CERN (Educational Site about CERN and Particle Physics)]
• [Globe of Science and Innovation info]
• [Microcosm Museum Info]
• [CERN Courier - International Journal of High-Energy Physics]

 

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