Cern

CERN
History
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), known as CERN, is an international organization whose goal is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory. This laboratory is located in the Northwest outskirts of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border. Created in 1954, the institution has twenty Europeanmembers. The current Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. (1)
Non-Member States with co-operation agreements with CERN are: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile,China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Georgia, Iceland, Iran, Jordan, Korea, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam Switzerland and the United Kingdom (1)
The abbreviation CERN comes from the French, ConseilEuropéen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, in English. This began as a council for setting up a laboratory established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new facility after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (EuropeanOrganization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. (2)
CERN employs just under 2,400 people. The Laboratory’s scientific and technical staff designs and constructs the particle accelerators and ensures their smooth operation. They also help prepare, run, analyze and study the data from multifaceted scientific experiments. Some 10,000 visiting scientists, about half of the world’s particle physicists, come toCERN for their research. They represent 608 universities and 113 nationalities.
CERN's primary role is to provide particle accelerator experiments and other infrastructure needs for high-energy physics research. Various experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of these. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The main site at Meyrin also hasa large computer centre containing extremely powerful data-processing facilities used primarily for experimental data analysis and because of the need to make data available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been a major wide area networking hub.(1)
The CERN facilities are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, but a collaboration. Member states' contributions to CERN for theyear 2008 totaled 1 billion dollars. Soon after CERN’s establishment, the efforts at the laboratory surpassed the study of the atomic nucleus to launch into higher-energy physics. Here they mainly concentrate on the study of interactions among particles. This is why the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics and this common name betterdescribes the research being performed there. (1)
Important achievements
* 1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber.
* 1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments.
* 1989: The determination of the number of light neutrino families at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) operating on the Z boson peak.
* 1995: Thefirst creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment.
* 1999: The discovery of direct CP-violation in the NA48 experiment.
* 2008: The LHC starts up
* 2010: The isolation of 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen
CERN’s other numerous achievements include: the1984 Nobel Prize in physics, awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for their experiments that led to the discoveries of...