CERN

On the border between Switzerland and France, near the airport in Geneva, lies the international research organization CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research). The CERN laboratory was founded in 1954 and has now 23 member countries from Europe, in addition to several associated member countries and partnerships. Physicists and engineers at CERN use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to push the boundaries of human knowledge and study the fundamental building blocks of our universe - fundamental particles. One of these instruments is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator, which was completed and used for scientific experiments in 2008. The accelerator is located 100 meters underground in a 27-kilometer-long circular tunnel of superconducting magnets. Around this tunnel, subatomic particles are accelerated near the speed of light before they are set on a collision course with each other or stationary targets. CERN also gave birth to the World Wide Web in the 1980s, and the world's first website was published from here in 1991.

Initially, the main focus of the CERN center was research in nuclear physics, but in recent times our understanding of matter goes much deeper than just the atomic nucleus itself, and the main area has developed into particle physics. Although the main area is particle physics, there are still large environments within nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry. To gain insight into the basic laws of nature and how the particles interact, the collisions in the LHC are studied in four large detectors; ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.