The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. It comprises 23 member states. Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only non-European full member. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing. Developed originally to support SETI@home, it became the platform for many other applications in areas as diverse as medicine, molecular biology, mathematics, linguistics, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others. The purpose of BOINC is to enable researchers to utilize processing resources of personal computers and other devices around the world.
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 across 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.
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.
Geant4 is a platform for "the simulation of the passage of particles through matter" using Monte Carlo methods. It is the successor of the GEANT series of software toolkits developed by The Geant4 Collaboration, and the first to use object oriented programming. Its development, maintenance and user support are taken care by the international Geant4 Collaboration. Application areas include high energy physics and nuclear experiments, accelerator and space physics studies. The software is used by a number of research projects around the world.
ROOT is an object-oriented computer program and library developed by CERN. It was originally designed for particle physics data analysis and contains several features specific to the field, but it is also used in other applications such as astronomy and data mining. The latest minor release is 6.28, as of 2023-02-03.
High-energy nuclear physics studies the behavior of nuclear matter in energy regimes typical of high-energy physics. The primary focus of this field is the study of heavy-ion collisions, as compared to lighter atoms in other particle accelerators. At sufficient collision energies, these types of collisions are theorized to produce the quark–gluon plasma. In peripheral nuclear collisions at high energies one expects to obtain information on the electromagnetic production of leptons and mesons that are not accessible in electron–positron colliders due to their much smaller luminosities.
Microcosm or CERN Museum was an interactive exhibition presenting the work of the CERN particle physics laboratory and its flagship accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It first opened to the public in 1990 and closed permanently in September 2022, to be replaced by the Science Gateway in 2023. The final version of the exhibition opened in January 2016, developed by CERN in collaboration with Spanish design team Indissoluble.
GEANT is the name of a series of simulation software designed to describe the passage of elementary particles through matter, using Monte Carlo methods. The name is an acronym formed from "GEometry ANd Tracking". Originally developed at CERN for high energy physics experiments, GEANT-3 has been used in many other fields.
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 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.
Hafeez Hoorani or Hafeez-ur-Rehman Hoorani or Hafeez R. Hoorani is a Pakistani particle physicist, with a specialisation in accelerator physics, and a research scientist at the CERN. Hoorani is working at the National Center for Physics, with research focus in elementary particle physics and high energy physics. Until the end of 2013, he served as scientific director of International Centre for Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) and is now research associate at the National Center for Nuclear Physics, Islamabad.
GridPP is a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the United Kingdom and CERN. They manage and maintain a distributed computing grid across the UK with the primary aim of providing resources to particle physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN. They are funded by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council. The collaboration oversees a major computing facility called the Tier1 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) along with the four Tier 2 organisations of ScotGrid, NorthGrid, SouthGrid and LondonGrid. The Tier 2s are geographically distributed and are composed of computing clusters at multiple institutes.
The search for the Higgs boson was a 40-year effort by physicists to prove the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, first theorised in the 1960s. The Higgs boson was the last unobserved fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery was described as being the "ultimate verification" of the Standard Model. In March 2013, the Higgs boson was officially confirmed to exist.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
Maria Girone is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the CERN openlab. She leads the development of High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies for particle physics experiments.
MATHUSLA is a proposed experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is a dedicated large-volume detector on the surface above CMS for exotic long-lived particles (LLPs) produced in LHC collisions, which can travel to the surface and decay into charged particles inside its decay volume. MATHUSLA is motivated by the fact that LLPs could easily escape detection in the existing LHC experiments, but their existence could explain major outstanding questions in particle physics, like possibly the hierarchy problem, dark matter, baryogenesis or the masses of neutrinos. MATHUSLA's location on the surface, shielded from the radiation of LHC collisions that can obfuscate LLP signals, as well as its large detection volume allows it to fill this capability gap and detect LLPs with very long lifetimes up to the ~0.1 second upper limit imposed by Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
Geoffrey Hall, is a British particle physicist, currently Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for developing radiation and particle detectors and other electronic instruments for use in particle physics experiments, notably the CMS detector in CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
