60 Years Anniversary, A massive leap for physics and humanity
9 December 1949 After the war
At the end of the Second World War, European science was no longer world-class. Following the example of international organizations, a handful of visionary scientists imagined creating a European atomic physics laboratory. Raoul Dautry, Pierre Auger and Lew Kowarski in France, Edoardo Amaldi in Italy and Niels Bohr in Denmark were among these pioneers. Such a laboratory would not only unite European scientists but also allow them to share the increasing costs of nuclear physics facilities.
French physicist Louis de Broglie put forward the first official proposal for the creation of a European laboratory at the European Cultural Conference, which opened in Lausanne on 9 December 1949. A further push came at the fifth UNESCO General Conference, held in Florence in June 1950, where American physicist and Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi tabled a resolution authorizing UNESCO to “assist and encourage the formation of regional research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration…”
At an intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951, the first resolution concerning the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research was adopted. Two months later, 11 countries signed an agreement establishing the provisional council – the acronym CERN was born.
29 September 1954 The Beginning
At the sixth session of the CERN Council, which took place in Paris from 29 June – 1 July 1953, the convention establishing the organization was signed, subject to ratification, by 12 states. The convention was gradually ratified by the 12 founding Member States: Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. On 29 September 1954, following ratification by France and Germany, the European Organization for Nuclear Research officially came into being. The provisional CERN was dissolved but the acronym remained.
24 November 1959 The Proton Synchrotron starts up
The Proton Synchrotron (PS) accelerated protons for the first time on 24 November 1959, becoming for a brief period the world’s highest energy particle accelerator. With a beam energy of 28 GeV, the PS became host to CERN’s particle physics programme, and provides beams for experiments to this day.
During the night of 24 November 1959 the PS reached its full energy. The next morning John Adams (pictured) announced the achievement in the main auditorium. In his hand is an empty vodka bottle, which he had received from Dubna with the message that it was to be drunk when CERN passed the Russian Synchrophasotron’s world-record energy of 10 GeV. The bottle contains a polaroid photograph of the 24 GeV pulse ready to be sent back to Dubna.
When CERN built new accelerators in the 1970s, the PS’s principle role became to supply particles to the new machines. Since the PS started up in 1959, the intensity of its proton beam has increased a thousandfold, and the machine has become the world’s most versatile particle juggler.
In the course of its history the PS has accelerated many different kinds of particles, feeding them to more powerful accelerators or directly to experiments.
10 September 2008 Large Hadron Colider
At 10.28am on 10 September 2008 a beam of protons was successfully steered around the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. The machine was ready to embark on a new era of discovery at the high-energy frontier.
LHC experiments address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the universe’s existence.
4 July 2012 Higgs Boson
At a seminar held at CERN on 4 July 2012 as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.
Particle Physics Freak life 