Highest energy physics experiments in CERN

About CERN

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. Here physicists come to explore what matter is made of and what forces hold it together.

CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible.

Founded in 1954, the laboratory was one of Europe's first joint ventures and includes now 20 Member States.

CERN employs just under 3000 people, representatives of a wide range of skills - physicists, engineers, technicians, craftsmen, administrators, secretaries, workmen,...

The scientific and technical staff designs and builds the laboratory's intricate machinery and ensures its smooth operation. It also helps prepare, run, analyse and interpret the complex scientific experiments.

Some 6500 visiting scientists, half of the world's particle physicists, come to CERN for their research. They represent 500 universities and over 80 nationalities.

Since its creation, CERN has made many important discoveries for which CERN scientists have received prestigious awards, including Nobel prizes.

The one most useful for you is the World Wide Web. It was developed to improve and speed-up the information sharing between physicists working in different universities and institutes all over the world, and now it has millions of academic and commercial users.

Why do physicists want to study particles?

Scientists have found that everything in the Universe is made up from a small number of basic building blocks called elementary particles, governed by a few fundamental forces.

Some of these particles are stable and form the normal matter, the others live for fractions of a second and then decay to the stable ones. All of them coexisted for a few instants after the Big Bang.

Since then, only the enormous concentration of energy that can be reached in an accelerator at CERN can bring them back to life. Therefore, studying particle collisions is like "looking back in time", recreating the environment present at the origin of our Universe.

What for? To understand the formation of stars, earth, trees, everything you see around and, finally, us!

What's next at CERN?

In the world of particle physics, higher energy is one of the key word to allow further discoveries. What's the origin of the mass of particles? Are neutrinos really massless?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate on particles proprieties.

Five experiments, with huge detectors, will study what happens when the LHC's beams collide. They will handle as much information as the entire European telecommunications network does today!

As well as having the highest energy of any accelerator in the world, the LHC will also have the most intense beams. Collisions will happen so fast (800 million times a second) that particles from one collision will still be travelling through the detector when the next collision happens. Understanding what happens in these collisions is the key to the LHC's success.

The experiments are: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb and TOTEM