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Superconductors accelerate progress
The LHC, the largest superconducting machine in the world, demonstrates how particle physics and CERN have been a driving force in the development of superconductors. Superconductivity quickly emerged as a very useful property for high-energy physics. Since superconductors lose all electrical resistance below a certain, very low temperature, they are able to transport very high…
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Into the antiworld
For each particle, there exists an antiparticle with opposite properties, in particular electric charge. This has been well established, ever since Paul Dirac’s theoretical predictions in the late 1920s. Over the three decades that followed, scientists discovered the constituents that would make up an antimatter atom: the antielectron (or positron), the antiproton and the antineutron.…
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Where the Web was bornā¦
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a young scientist working at CERN, wrote a proposal for an information management system based on the Internet. At the time, few people really understood the significance of his seemingly abstract idea. Luckily, however, his supervisor and a few colleagues had the foresight to let him work on an invention that…
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Green light for LEP
The Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) project was first presented to the CERN Council in June 1980, following the development of several concepts at different energies and lengths. The project envisaged an energy of 50 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) per beam and a circumference of 27 km, using the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS)…
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Coming together to celebrate CERN70
This year has seen a wealth of activities for CERNās 70th anniversary. More is to still to come, including the CERN70 Community Event on 17 September CERNās 70th anniversary is a remarkable milestone, and celebrations at CERN and across Member and Associate Member States have been taking place since the official launch in January 2024.…
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The end of the alphabet
In 1983, CERN reached the end of the alphabet when the Laboratory announced the discovery of the long-sought W and Z particles. The announcement was so momentous that, the following year, the two scientists behind the discovery received the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1984, Carlo Rubbia, the instigator of the conversion of the Super…
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The Laboratory takes shape
Part 2 of the CERN70 feature series Franco Bonaudi, one of the pioneers of CERN’s accelerators, looks back at the Laboratory’s early years, during which everything had yet to be invented
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A first discovery
A few months after CERNās first accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron (SC), was commissioned, a first experiment was launched. At the time, weak interactions were among the most hotly debated topics in high-energy physics. Scientists were puzzled, for example, about the decay of the particle known as the pion. The particle was known to decay into two…
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The dark side of the muon
In the 1950s, the muon was still a complete enigma. Physicists could not yet say with certainty whether it was simply a much heavier electron (with 200 times the mass) or whether it belonged to another species of particle. Acting on an idea of Leon Lederman, CERN launched the āg-2ā experiment in 1959, aimed at…
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Tracing particles
In the 1960s and 1970s, two techniques for accurately recording the tracks of invisible particles dominated experimental high-energy physics, the bubble chamber and the spark chamber. The pictures produced ā simple photographs ā were then examined for interesting tracks by specially trained personnel, the āscannersā. The bubble chamber programme at CERN started in 1959, when…