Happy Birthday CERN!

Today marks 60 years since the 12 founding member states ratified the CERN convention and the European Organization for Nuclear Research was born.

The world's largest particle physics laboratory is celebrating “60 years of science for peace” with an official ceremony today.

“With its discoveries and innovations, CERN has been bringing the world together through science for 60 years. We'd like to celebrate this important anniversary with our friends and neighbours,” said Rolf Heuer, CERN’s Director General.

The acronym CERN – Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire – was first used in 1951 when 11 countries signed an agreement establishing a provisional council with the mandate of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. The provisional CERN was dissolved but the acronym remained.

The organisation set out to address questions such as what is the Universe made of? Where did it come from, where is it going and why does it behave the way it does?

Over the 60 years it has been home to several generations of high energy particle accelerators including Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2011. Its first was the 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (SC) built in 1957, which provided beams for CERN’s first experiments in particle and nuclear physics. It was closed down in 1990 after 33 years in service.

CERN was also home to Tim Berners-Lee, who by the end of 1990 had defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he had written the first browser and server software.

But CERN has revolutionised our lives in other ways too: electronic particle detection techniques have transformed medical diagnosis. Detectors invented by Georges Charpak in 1968 allow X-ray images to be made using a fraction of the dose required by photographic methods, while crystals developed for CERN experiments in the 1980s are now ubiquitous in PET scanners. And today, developments for a new generation of CERN detectors are allowing PET and MRI imaging techniques to be combined in a single device.

The organisation now has 21 member states, and 25 different experiments, with over 3,000 scientists from 60 countries working at its facility in Geneva and almost 12,000 associated members.

Successes at CERN

1965: First observations of antinuclei.

1968: Development of a multiwire proportional chamber – a new class of detector which revolutionised particle detection, passing it from the manual to electronic era.

1971: The world’s first interaction from colliding protons recorded.

1981: First proton-antiproton collisions.

1983: Discovery of W and Z particles.

1990: World’s first website and server go live. The first website was info.cern.ch

1995: The first antiatoms of antihydrogen produced.

2008: The first beam of protons made it way around the 27km ring of the LHC.

2011: ALPHA traps antimatter atoms for 1000 seconds – over 16 minutes – which allowed scientists to study their properties in detail.

2011: Hints of the Higgs boson existence, confirmed in 2012.

Credit: CERN

Check out our video with CERN general director Professor Rolf Heuer here