Information AboutCern |
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The European Organization for Nuclear Research ( 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 Accelerator s needed for High Energy Physics research and numerous Experiment s 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 grew after it was used in the opening scenes of 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. 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 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:
THE ACCELERATOR OF THE FUTURE: THE LHC detector for LHC at CERN]] 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 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
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:
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. All of these experimental sites are in France, 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 Charm ed 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 1980's. 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 Point s in Switzerland . MEMBER STATES The original CERN signatories were:
Image:Flag of SFR Yugoslavia.svg Since then:
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:
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