The European Organization for Nuclear Research ( ), known as CERN

CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them. The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.

As an international facility, the CERN sites are officially under neither Swiss nor French jurisdiction. Member states' contributions to CERN for the year 2008 totalled CHF 1 billion (approximately €664 million, US$ 1 billion).

History

The convention establishing CERN was signed on [[29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe.Cref: a The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is 1".Fact: date=November 2007

Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.

Scientific achievements

Several important achievements in particle physics have been made during experiments at CERN. These include, but are not limited to, the following.

• 1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamberhttp://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/History73-en.html.
• 1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experimentshttp://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/History83-en.html.
• 1989: The determination of the number of neutrino families at the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) operating on the Z boson peak.
• 1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experimenthttp://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/History95-en.html.
• 1999: The discovery of the direct CP-violation in the NA48 experimentV. Fanti et al., Phys. Lett. B465 (1999) 335 (hep-ex/9909022).