CERN at 70: Smashing elementary particles for humanity

The European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — is a place of scientific breakthroughs.

Since 1954, thousands of the world's best scientists and emerging minds have converged on Switzerland to explore how the universe works. On September 29, CERN will celebrate its 70th anniversary.

CERN has been the seat of some of the most important discoveries in science — from the confirmation of the elusive Higgs boson in 2012, to more practical innovations like the invention of the World Wide Web.

The Large Hadron Collider

CERN is perhaps best known for its extensive underground particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 27-kilometer-long (16-miles-long) tube built beneath the Swiss and French borderlands near Geneva. 

Scientists have been accelerating particles around the LHC since September 2008.

The LHC works by sending separate, highly energized particle beams in opposite directions through the 27-kilometer-long tubular vacuum.

The particle beams consist of a type of particle called protons, which are guided by superconducting electromagnets, making them collide at almost the speed of light.

The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is like firing two needles 10 kilometers at each other with the precision to make them collide. 

When the particles collide, they produce energy that is used to create new particles.

The LHC is one of 11 other particle accelerators based at CERN. Researchers use them to help advance a range of technologies, including some that impact our daily lives.

Their research has helped construct more powerful computers and microchips, improve the quality of technology used in healthcare, energy and space exploration.

Higgs boson breakthrough in 2012

At the top of CERN's agenda using the LHC was the ambition to find the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson is a type of particle named after Nobel Prize physicist Peter Higgs. Higgs believed the particle created a field which fills the entire universe and gives other particles their mass. 

In 2012, after decades of research, scientists at CERN finally found proof of Higgs' theory — they had found a Higgs boson. 

It was a colossal scientific breakthrough that opened a whole new field of particle physics research and helped explain why particles bunched together at the formation of the universe.

CERN aren't trying to create black holes

Prior to the LHC being switched on, there were concerns that smashing protons together at sub-light speed would lead to the formation of tiny black holes. 

We think of black holes forming only when massive stars implode, but some theories suggest that tiny, quantum black holes can form when particles collide.

These tiny black holes are nothing like the black holes that suck matter inside them in space. They would only last for fractions of a second and be completely safe.

In fact, CERN researchers might like the formation of such a theoretical black hole inside a particle accelerator. It would give them an opportunity to see how gravity behaves on a quantum scale.

What's next for CERN?

Scientists aren't finished with CERN's LHC. Beyond the discovery of the Higgs bosons, there are many other fundamental, unanswered questions about the universe.

They are developing a second-generation High Luminosity LHC. The upgrade will enable them to increase the number of proton collisions in the LHC to be at least five times.

This "LH-LHC" will likely be operational around 2041. Scientists aim to perform detailed studies of Higgs bosons by generating at least 15 million of the particles each year.

With the use of upgraded technology to generate more particles (and collisions), CERN hopes it will learn more about the once elusive Higgs boson, and discover new particles as yet unknown to science.

Edited by: Fred Schwaller