What is CERN?
▶ Transcript
So, here we are. This is it, the final chapter of this course. Now, before we come to an end, we want to tell you a couple of things about our workplace, CERN. It is an absolutely fantastic place. We will briefly go through its history and discuss how CERN works as an intergovernmental organization. And at the end of this chapter, we will highlight possible scenarios about the future of CERN, and how you could get involved in particle physics research as well.
Ok, let us start with the name. CERN. This is an acronym, and it stands for "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire". No worries, this is the only time you will hear me speak French in this chapter. The name translates to the European Council for Nuclear Research. However, nowadays, CERN is usually referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
CERN was officially founded in 1954. So, in 2019, we celebrated our 65th anniversary. But CERN's history started a couple of years before that, in 1949. At the end of the Second World War, European research was no longer world-class. Many eminent scientists had to leave their home countries and emigrated to, for example, the USA. Therefore, a lot of brilliant scientists, such as Pierre Auger, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and several others suggested the creation of a European particle physics laboratory. Their motivation was not just to set up a centre of excellence in physics, but also to reunite European scientists and to re-establish relations between European countries after the Second World War. Indeed, the unofficial slogan of CERN was "science for peace", and we still proudly use it today.
In the beginning, twelve founding Member States were involved in the process: Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. In 1953, to formalise the establishment of CERN, representatives of each country signed the so-called CERN Convention. Yes, this historical document can be seen as the birth certificate of CERN. In 1954, once all Member States had ratified the CERN Convention, CERN officially came into being, and Geneva was chosen as the seat because of its central location in Europe and its international tradition.
Let us have a quick look at the list of the twelve founding Member States one more time. We have listed them in the same order as their signatures appear on the CERN Convention. Can you spot the pattern behind it? No, it has nothing to do with how large a country is, or how many scientists were involved in the process of establishing CERN. It is simpler and way more logical! They are sorted alphabetically. But not according to the English names of the countries. Instead, their French names were used. Yes, CERN is truly an international organization, and as such, we have two official languages: English and French!
Ok, now it is time to leave history behind and focus on the present. Today, CERN has more than 30 Member States and so-called Associate Member States. Indeed, it is quite an impressive list, and if you want to have a closer look, we have a link in the video description below. Together, these countries provide funding for CERN and take decisions about its future. In case you are interested, our annual budget is roughly 1.2 billion Swiss francs. This converts to about 1.1 billion Euros or 1.3 billion US dollars. Wow, billions of francs, or Euros, or dollars! That sounds a lot! And yes, between the two of us, this is a lot of money. But for a large organization like CERN, this is not a lot of money.
Let me show you what I mean. CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. It comprises hundreds of different buildings and experimental halls, both on the surface and underground. Most of them are packed with expensive high-tech equipment. Every day, there are about 10 000 people on site. But this is not all. In total, there are more than 20 000 people associated with CERN. Not all of them are physically present all the time, and they come from many different countries - not just from CERN's Member States and Associate Member States. As I said earlier, CERN is truly an international organization. This is one of the reasons why we enjoy working here so much. You get to meet and collaborate with so many brilliant people from all around the world. Sometimes even in different languages or a mixture of different languages.
You would probably expect that the majority of people who work at CERN are physicists. But this is not necessarily true. Only a small group of us are physicists. The majority of CERN scientists work in computing and engineering. Of course, many of them have a physics background or at least a strong interest in physics. But CERN itself is a service provider for accelerated particles. This is our speciality. And for this, we need a lot of engineers and computer scientists. We develop and run the most powerful particle accelerators in the world that can be used by collaborations of physicists for their high-energy physics experiments. This means CERN hosts several international collaborations that operate particle detectors, such as, for example, the ATLAS detector or the CMS detector. These collaborations itself are huge. For instance, a couple of years ago, ATLAS and CMS published a joint paper: it had 5 154 authors! Can you imagine? And these are not even all of the members of the collaborations. In this paper, only nine pages are describing the research. Then there are 24 pages of names! I am not kidding! If you are curious to see this paper, the link is down in the video description.
Ok, but I am sure that you are also interested to hear more about our life at CERN. For example, how does a typical day at CERN look like? Well, this is not so easy to answer because there are so many people from so many different backgrounds. I mean, at CERN there are physicists, engineers, computer scientists, technicians, diplomats, doctors, librarians, and many more. There are young students at the beginning of their research career, scientists who retired but still come in every day, and everything in between. There is just not one typical day at CERN. But there is one constant across all levels of CERN, and these are coffee machines. Yes, you heard us mention coffee plenty of times throughout this course. We even have our own coffee mug with the short version of the Standard Model of particle physics printed on it. Of course, this does not mean that we are all sleep-deprived and exhausted. But it shows that coffee or at least tea breaks are essential in particle physics. There are definitely plenty of physics puzzles and new ideas for experiments that were discussed over a hot beverage first. In this case, we usually use the napkins to take meeting notes, before returning to our offices :)
CERN is sometimes described as a small city. Indeed, there are several restaurants located on the different CERN sites, we have our own fire brigade with awesome firefighters, our own medical service, and we have many different clubs. No, not night clubs. There is no night club at CERN. But there is a music club, a ski club, a dancing club, a games club, the CERN choir, and many, many more! This makes sense. If you are dealing with high-energetic particles and challenging physics concepts all day long, it is essential to keep a healthy work-life balance.
Alright, we already mentioned that CERN is a service provider for accelerated particles that can be used in high-energy physics experiments. With these experiments, we try to tackle the mysteries of physics and to answer fundamental questions, such as, where do we come from? What are we made of? Where are we going? So, CERN's core business is fundamental research – fundamental research in the field of particle physics.
The cool thing about fundamental research is that it goes hand in hand with the constant improvement and development of our research tools. Pushing the boundaries of technology in this way is crucial for fundamental research. This also means that we, from time to time, develop new technologies that are not just useful for our research, but also for our daily lives. For instance, the fact that you can watch this video right now is only possible because a scientist at CERN invented the World Wide Web. Yes, the web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN. Of course, he did not do this so we can now stream videos or scroll through hundreds of cat pictures. His problem was way simpler. He needed a way to share data with scientists from different universities and institutes from around the world. This is how the World Wide Web started and because CERN made it openly available it is now an essential part of our daily lives. If you are curious to check out the first website ever, there is a link down in the video description.
Ok, so, what is the future of particle physics? What is the future of CERN? Well, during this course, we already highlighted several open questions that we cannot answer at the moment. All of them have the potential to lead to several Nobel Prizes in physics. Indeed, we know that we do not know a lot about our Universe. Or, let me rephrase this, we know that there is still a lot to be discovered. That is why we are already thinking about the post-LHC era.
As we discussed, every circular accelerator can only operate in a certain range of energy. Suppose we reach the upper limit of a circular accelerator. In that case, we either have to replace the existing magnets with even stronger ones or build a new circular accelerator with a larger circumference and ideally with stronger magnets. And this is exactly our plan for the future. Currently, we are preparing the LHC and the detectors surrounding the interaction points for several upgrades that will take place over the next years. These upgrades will allow us to record even more collisions per bunch crossing. But at some point, we will have to replace the LHC with a completely new accelerator. At least, this would be the plan if we want to continue with our approach of colliding particles at the highest energies possible. In this case, we can either construct two super large linear accelerators that accelerate particles towards each other, or an even larger circular accelerator, the so-called Future Circular Collider. But in any case, even without a new accelerator on the horizon, we know one fact for sure: we will need the next generation of scientists to help us push forward the frontiers of human knowledge! Yes, we will need you! :)
So, if you made it all the way to the end, we want to first thank you wholeheartedly for following along in this course. We hope that it gave you a nice overview of particle physics, that it answered some of your questions, but that it also gave you new questions to figure out! And remember, once you graduate from high-school and find yourself studying any subject related to particle physics, CERN could be the place for you!