CERN’s 60th anniversary
On 29 September 1954, the CERN Convention entered into force, officially establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research with 12 European member states. Now the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory, CERN is celebrating in 2014 “60 years of science for peace”, with an official ceremony and several public events taking place throughout September.
The highlight of this anniversary month is the official ceremony on 29 September, which will be attended by many representatives of CERN’s Member States, Associate Member States and Observers…
The LHC is waking up
Many theories consider sleeping as a boost in human performance. This is exactly what is happening at the LHC at CERN. After almost 2 years of silent signal, sections of the LHC are reactivated one by one with upgraded performance. The wake-up period will last for the next few months until the 13 TeV physics programme can fully begin in 2015.
Even if no data measurements are currently underway in the LHC, many things have happened during the 18-month shutdown that began in 2013. Indeed, major upgrades have been undertaken, in particular regarding the proton synchrotron and the super proton synchrotron. Incredible efforts have been deployed to upgrade…
CERN: a jewel in science as part of our heritage
To celebrate CERN’s 60th anniversary, a special ceremony took place at the laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, on 19 June 2014. The occasion was the declaration as an EPS Historic Site of the first CERN accelerator, the 600 MeV SynchroCyclotron [SC], built in the 1950s when CERN was making its debut as an international particle physics laboratory in Europe.
The SC started up in 1957 and witnessed very important physics achievements over its 33 years of operation. It had a key role in the early stages of our understanding of weak interactions, in particular with…
First beam of antihydrogen atoms
ASACUSA at CERN, Antiproton Decelerator [AD], a Japanese-European collaboration working on antihydrogen production for the CPT symmetry test, has unambiguously detected an antihydrogen beam 2.7 meters downstream from the production region, for the first time. This is an important milestone towards high precision tests of the CPT symmetry via antihydrogen spectroscopy.
It is well-known that matter and antimatter are always created in equal amounts in laboratory experiments. It is …
An unconventional 4-quark particle
On 9 April 2014, researchers at the LHCb experiment published a paper validating the existence of an exotic particle, which appears to be a tetraquark. The LHCb spokesperson Pierluigi Campana said: “We are very happy to have confirmed this particle, which is in fact a very strange object.”
Precisely 50 years ago, George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann independently introduced the Quark Model, which is a fundamental cornerstone in particle physics. The model is a perfect tool to understand how matter interacts…
A common past and future for ESA and CERN
On 28 March 2014, CERN and the European Space Agency [ESA] signed a framework agreement for future cooperation on research and technology in areas of mutual interest. The signature arises from the collaborative vision of Edoardo Amaldi, founding father of both organizations.
Edoardo Amaldi (1908 – 1989) had an strong belief in the open nature of science and the need for international cooperation. After participating in the creation of CERN during the 1950s, he became Secretary General of…
First proposal about WWW from 1989
Exactly 25 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal addressing the complex issue of information management at CERN. The project was based on linked information using hypertexts. Revolutionising the idea of archiving documents, it laid the foundation of the Internet.
In 1984, Tim Berners-Lee took up a fellowship at CERN, 8 years after his graduation from the Queen’s College at Oxford University, United Kingdom. His first job there was related with the distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. In this context T. Berners-Lee submitted the proposal that would provide…
FCC and more after LHC
Particle physics takes the long-term view. Originally conceived in the 1980s, the LHC took another 25 years to come into being. This accelerator, which is unlike any other, is just at the start of a longer programme, which is expected to run for another 20 years.
Even now, plans are being hatched for a large-scale upgrade to increase luminosity and thereby exploit the LHC to its full potential. The high luminosity LHC is CERN’s number-one priority and will increase the number of collisions accumulated in the experiments by a factor of 10 from 2024 onwards…
1954: CERN was born
The Laboratory was the first scientific pan-European endeavour. Just a few years after the Second World War, twelve European countries joined forces and built what has become the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. In 2014, CERN will celebrate 60 years of cutting-edge science for peace.
It all started in 1949, when French Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Louis de Broglie called for the creation of a European laboratory. The idea was quickly adopted and, in 1953, twelve countries signed the Convention for the establishment…
Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 to François Englert and Peter Higgs
On 8 October 2013, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 jointly to François Englert (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium) and Peter W. Higgs (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s…
CERN welcomes Ukraine as an Associate Member
Since the 3 October 2013, Ukraine is an Associate Member of CERN. It represents the first step for Ukraine to become a full member of CERN and a concrete step towards the integration of Ukraine into Europe.
CERN Director General Rolf Heuer and the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Kostyantyn Ivanovych Gryschenko signed the document in Geneva. The signature fulfils a long collaboration between Ukraine and CERN, beginning with a Co-operation Agreement in 1993. The relation was further strengthened in 2011 through a join Declaration…
CAS course on Advanced Accelerator Physics in Norway
The CERN Accelerator School [CAS] and the Norwegian University of science and Technology [NTNU] recently organised a course on Advanced Accelerator Physics. The course was held in Trondheim, Norway from 18-29 August 2013 at the NTNU.
The course followed an established format with lectures in the mornings and practical courses in the afternoons. The lecture program consisted of 32 lectures, supplemented by discussion sessions, private study and…
