CERN

Formally established in 1954

CERN grew from post-war discussions about a shared European physics laboratory. A provisional council established in 1952 supplied the acronym from its French name, Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire.

The convention establishing the permanent organization was signed in Paris in 1953 and entered into force on 29 September 1954. The provisional council, signature and entry into force marked different stages in creating the organization.

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Accelerators raise the energy of particle beams, which then collide with other beams or targets. Detectors record the products, allowing researchers to investigate particles and interactions through tracks, energies and other measurements.

The Large Hadron Collider forms part of CERN’s accelerator complex. It occupies a ring about 27 kilometres long and first started up in 2008. Experiments including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb use distinct detectors and pursue different research questions.

References: [3]

CERN supplies shared accelerators, infrastructure and technical resources, while researchers from many institutions collaborate on experiments. This division of work supports instruments and data analysis beyond the practical scale of a single institution.

The convention excludes work for military requirements and calls for experimental and theoretical results to be published or otherwise made generally available. Cooperation and the circulation of results are therefore part of the organization’s founding framework.

References: [3] [1]

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989 to improve information sharing among researchers. Hypertext links, browsers and servers provided a common way to access documents held on different computers.

On 30 April 1993 CERN placed the Web software in the public domain, later making a release available under an open licence. A tool developed for scientific collaboration consequently became available for much wider use.

References: [4]