25 member states and a 27-kilometre ring: the particle physics laboratory near Geneva

Background

CERN is the laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva where physicists study the smallest building blocks of matter. Founded in 1954, it was one of the first joint ventures of its kind in Europe, and it now has 25 member states along with 11 Associate Member States. The short name came from the French title of the provisional body set up for it, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire; because the work today is particle physics, the laboratory is also called the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Its instruments are purpose-built accelerators and detectors: accelerators drive beams of particles to very high energy, and detectors record what happens when those beams meet. The Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets, is the largest and most powerful of the accelerators and first started up in 2008. Beams inside it cross at four points, where the detectors ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb are placed. Skills built for this work, from cryogenics to ultra-high vacuums, are carried over into other fields.