A lab to live by

CERN continues to be a hotspot for scientific discovery

- By Ceri Perkins

WHAT IS CERN AND WHAT DOES IT DO?

The European Organization for Nuclear Research – known by its French acronym, CERN – is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Located just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, it was established in 1954, as one of post-war Europe’s first joint ventures, with the express aim of halting the ‘brain drain’ of talented scientists leaving the continent for America. Today, more than 10,000 scientists hailing from more than 100 countries find themselves at CERN each year to use its facilities, which include some of the biggest and most complex scientific instruments ever created. Their goal: figure out what the universe is made of and the laws of physics that dictate its behaviour.

WHAT DISCOVERIES HAVE BEEN MADE THERE?

Highlights include the 1983 discovery of a pair of elementary particles called the W and Z bosons, which was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee helped invent the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 by developing a way for computers to talk to each other, called hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). In 1995, CERN scientists were the first to create atoms of hydrogen’s antimatter counterpart, antihydrogen. In 2000, they discovered a new state of matter: a hot, dense, particle soup called quark-gluon plasma. And the Higgs boson was observed for the first time in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scooping its discoverers a Nobel Prize.

WHAT IS THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER AND HOW DOES IT WORK?