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Microcosm or CERN Museum is an interactive exhibition presenting the work of the CERN particle physics laboratory and its flagship accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The current exhibition officially opened in January 2016. [1] Contents were developed by CERN in collaboration with Spanish design team Indissoluble. [2]
The project was approved by the CERN Directorate in February 1988. The initial construction, to a large extent completed in 1989, was financed through contributions from the Canton of Geneva, the Swiss Confederation, neighbouring France, banks, and industrial firms. [3] [4]
The exhibition displays many real objects, taking visitors on a journey through CERN's key installations, from the hydrogen bottle, source of the protons that are injected into the LHC, through the first step in the accelerator chain, the linac, on to a model of a section of the Large Hadron Collider including elements from the superconducting magnets. Visitors can interact with the displays to try their hand at the controls of a particle accelerator – simulating the acceleration of protons in the LHC and bringing them into collision inside the experiments.
The exhibition continues with a 1:1 scale model of a complete slice through the CMS experiment at the LHC. The computing section displays some of the Oracle data tapes used to store the 30-40 petabytes of data produced yearly by the experiments, made available for analysis using the LHC Computing GRID. The annex to the exhibition contains other historical artifacts such as the central tracker from the UA1 detector, which ran at the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN from 1981 to 1984, and helped discover the W and Z bosons.
A project began in 2013 to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the World Wide Web. Some of the original code resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact. [5] This effort coincided with the 20th anniversary of the research center giving the web to the world. [6]
The Microcosm garden is named Léon Van Hove Square in honour of CERN's Research Director-General from 1976 to 1980. [7] The garden features several large components of old CERN experiments.
Microcosm is located at CERN in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, near the town of Meyrin. Entrance is free, without reservation, open 6 days a week. [8]
Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation. Although the word particle can refer to various types of very small objects, particle physics usually investigates the irreducibly smallest detectable particles and the fundamental interactions necessary to explain their behaviour.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
ATLAS is the largest, general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, 6.9 kilometres (4.3 mi) in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Roman pot is the name of a technique used in accelerator physics. Named after its implementation by the CERN Rome group in the early 1970s, it is an important tool to measure the total cross section of two particle beams in a collider. They are called pots because the detectors are housed in cylindrical vessels. The first generation of Roman pots was purpose-built by the CERN Central Workshops and used in the measurement of the total cross-section of proton-proton inter-actions in the ISR.
The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider is an upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located at the French-Swiss border near Geneva. From 2011 to 2020, the project was led by Lucio Rossi. In 2020 the lead role was taken up by Oliver Brüning.
The LHCf is a special-purpose Large Hadron Collider experiment for astroparticle physics, and one of eight detectors in the LHC accelerator at CERN. The other seven are: ATLAS, ALICE, CMS, MoEDAL, TOTEM, LHCb and FASER. LHCf is designed to study the particles generated in the "forward" region of collisions, those almost directly in line with the colliding proton beams. It therefore consists of two detectors, 140 m on either side of the interaction point. Because of this large distance, it can co-exist with a more conventional detector surrounding the interaction point, and shares the interaction point IP1 with the much larger general-purpose ATLAS experiment.
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), formerly the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), is an international collaborative project that consists of a grid-based computer network infrastructure incorporating over 170 computing centers in 42 countries, as of 2017. It was designed by CERN to handle the prodigious volume of data produced by Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments.
The CERN hadron Linacs are linear accelerators that accelerate beams of hadrons from a standstill to be used by the larger circular accelerators at the facility.
The Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) is an accelerator study for a possible upgrade of the existing LHC storage ring - the currently highest energy proton accelerator operating at CERN in Geneva. By adding to the proton accelerator ring a new electron accelerator, the LHeC would enable the investigation of electron-proton and electron-ion collisions at unprecedented high energies and rate, much higher than had been possible at the electron-proton collider HERA at DESY at Hamburg, which terminated its operation in 2007. The LHeC has therefore a unique program of research, as on the substructure of the proton and nuclei or the physics of the newly discovered Higgs boson. It is an electron–ion collider, similar to the plans in the US and elsewhere, although the present design would not include polarized protons.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed post-LHC particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders. The FCC project examines scenarios for three different types of particle collisions: hadron collisions in a collider design known as FCC-hh, electron–positron collisions in a collider design known as FCC-ee, and proton–electron collisions in a collider design known as FCC-eh.
Vinod Chandrasinh Chohan was a Tanzanian-born accelerator specialist and engineer. He was a Senior Staff Member at CERN for nearly 40 years.
The Super Proton–Antiproton Synchrotron was a particle accelerator that operated at CERN from 1981 to 1991. To operate as a proton-antiproton collider the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) underwent substantial modifications, altering it from a one beam synchrotron to a two-beam collider. The main experiments at the accelerator were UA1 and UA2, where the W and Z boson were discovered in 1983. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer received the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for their decisive contribution to the SppS-project, which led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. Other experiments conducted at the SppS were UA4, UA5 and UA8.
FASER is planned to be one of the eight particle physics experiments in 2022 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is designed to both search for new light and weakly coupled elementary particles, and to study the interactions of high-energy neutrinos.
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss Experimental Particle Physicist and a Visiting Professor at Loyola University Maryland. He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered as the largest experiment in the history of physical science.
The Scattering and Neutrino Detetcor (SND) at Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, is currently being built for the detection of the collider neutrinos. The primary goal of SND is to measure the p+p --> +X process and search for the feebly interacting particles. It will be operational from 2022, during the LHC-Run 3 (2022-2024). SND will be installed in an empty tunnel- TI18 that links the LHC and Super Proton Synchrotron, 480m away from the ATLAS experiment interaction point in the fast forward region and along the beam collision axis.
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| Large Hadron Collider (LHC) | |
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| Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) | |
| Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) | |
| Proton Synchrotron (PS) | |
| Linear accelerators | |
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