CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s leading laboratories for particle physics.
At CERN, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the fundamental particles and laws of nature.
In 2012, two experiments at CERN – ATLAS and CMS – announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the until then missing piece in the Standard Model, which encapsulates our best understanding of the behaviour of all fundamental particles in the universe. The 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs, for their theoretical work underpinning the Standard Model, which was confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson.
CERN belongs to a globally coordinated particle physics community, providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities that enable research at the forefront of human knowledge. But CERN is the only laboratory that has over 60 years’ experience in delivering cutting-edge particle accelerators, including the world’s highest energy particle collider – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – and beam facilities from the lowest to the highest energies available.
Diversity and peaceful collaboration are intrinsic to CERN. A user community of just over 12 000 scientists and engineers, representing over 100 nationalities, work together at CERN, on equal footing. CERN is committed to open science and to open innovation: CERN’s scientific results are available in open access and all software tools developed in-house are available in open source.
CERN’s scientific programme is compelling, unique and diverse. In carrying out its research, CERN trains the future generations of scientists and engineers. Furthermore, the knowledge generated at CERN and the technological innovations driven by the science have and still do contribute to other areas of society. Indeed, CERN is an ideal showcase of knowledge transfer: it gave the world the world wide web and has been a pioneer in other technologies, such as touch screens and PET scanners. Today CERN technologies continue to have applications in many fields beyond high energy physics, namely in medical applications, in energy and in safety.
To build its accelerators and detectors, CERN develops cutting-edge technology in various technology domains (e.g.: superconductivity, microelectronics, cryogenics, big data, ultra-high vacuum) and half of its annual budget returns to industry through procurement for a wide range of goods and services.
