Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire

CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations.

CERN’s expertise builds broadly on three technical fields: Accelerators, Detectors and Computing. Behind these three pillars of technology, lies a great number of areas of expertise: from cryogenics to ultra-high vacuums, from particle tracking and radiation monitoring to superconductivity and many more.

There are now two computers at CERN, the original Ferranti Mercury and the IBM 7090, a transistorized and more powerful replacement for its predecessor, the IBM 709.

Blue umbrella with CERN logo. The CERN logo is made up of two components : The word “CERN”, which is the acronym derived from the Organization’s first official title : Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research.

Archiving the vast quantities of data is an essential function at CERN. Magnetic tapes are used as the main long-term storage medium and data from the archive is continuously migrated to newer technology, higher density tapes. The CERN storage system, EOS, was created for the extreme LHC computing requirements.

Oracle Autonomous Database

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 member states.

Visit the CERN shop at the Esplanade des Particules and buy a souvenir such as an LHC-dipole USB charger, a Standard Model mug, clothes for children and babies, caps, umbrellas and many more items.

The story goes that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman referred to the Higgs as the “Goddamn Particle.” The nickname was meant to poke fun at how difficult it was to detect the particle. It took nearly half a century and a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to do it.

Assuming it was a proton, this particle traveled at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light, its Lorentz factor was 3.2×1011 and its rapidity was 27.1.