Research scale of European Institute of Particle Physics

CERN is the first joint research institution in Europe, funded by 20 member countries, and its outstanding achievements have become a model of international cooperation. CERN is located at the junction of France and Switzerland, just outside Geneva. CERN mainly studies how substances are made up and what binds them together. CERN has the largest electron-positron collider LEP (large electron-positron collider) and super proton synchrotron SPS (super proton synchrotron) in the world. As shown in the figure, the great circle is LEP with a circumference of 27 kilometers, and particles can accelerate to 1 1000 cycles per second, which is close to the speed of light. The small circle is a four-layer particle detector of SPS and accelerator, which is used to analyze particle properties.

More than 6,500 scientists from more than 80 countries, more than 500 universities and research institutions around the world (accounting for half of the global particle physicists) conducted experiments in CERN. CERN itself has a wealth of technical support personnel who set up facilities and ensure their normal operation. All experiments usually require hundreds of scientists to complete on huge equipment, and CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. 1990, Tim Berners Lee, a computer scientist at CERN, conceived and developed the client and server of the World Wide Web, and defined URL, HTTP, HTML, etc. In order to facilitate the cooperation among high-energy physicists distributed all over the world. Thanks to the contributions of Tim and others, the Internet has become what it is today.