European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), international organization founded to promote research in particle physics. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) was created in 1954. It retained the acronym of its predecessor organization, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), which had been established two years earlier. CERN’s research facility is located outside Geneva, Switzerland, on the border between Switzerland and France. Twenty European nations cooperatively fund and administer the organization.

CERN promotes research in particle physics and related fields for peaceful purposes, and publicizes the results of such research. CERN’s physicists carry out experiments using several enormous underground particle accelerators, the largest of which is 27 km (17 mi) in circumference.

Physicists at CERN have made many important discoveries. Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia and Dutch physicist Simon van der Meer discovered the W and Z particles using CERN’s accelerators in 1983. W and Z particles transmit the weak force, one of the fundamental forces of nature. The discovery, which won Rubbia and van der Meer the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics, helped confirm a theory that the weak force and the electromagnetic force are one and the same. CERN physicists have also tested and confirmed predictions of the standard model, a theory that describes the properties of all elementary particles and how they interact with one another. In 2000 physicists at CERN reported that the facility’s Large Electron-Positron (LEP) accelerator detected evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle or field that physicists believe is responsible for giving other fundamental particles their mass. Before the discovery could be confirmed, however, LEP was shut down to make room for a new and more powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When completed, the LHC will be the most powerful accelerator in the world.

Research sponsored by CERN has resulted in other types of advances as well. The World Wide Web, for example, was originally created at CERN by British scientist Timothy Berners-Lee as a means of sharing information among researchers.