Latest Press Releases

CERN welcomes its first choreographer in residence 14.05.2012

Space, time and gravity are under the cultural spotlight at CERN this month with the arrival of Gilles Jobin, the laboratory's first choreographer in residence and winner of the Collide@CERN Geneva prize, which is supported by the Canton and City of Geneva. Jobin is an internationally renowned Swiss choreographer with a company in Geneva. His CERN inspiration partner for his three-month residency at the laboratory will be the multimedia producer and visualization specialist, João Pequenão, who studied physics at the University of Lisbon.

New phase of CERN openlab to tackle exascale IT challenges for science 09.05.2012

The fourth phase of CERN openlab was officially launched during a meeting of its board of sponsors taking place at CERN on 8 and 9 May. CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading information technology companies HP, Intel, Oracle, Siemens, with contribution from Huawei for this new phase. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide community working on LHC data. 

CERN awards major contract for computer infrastructure hosting to Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Hungary 08.05.2012

CERN today signed a contract with the Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest for an extension to the CERN data centre. Under the new agreement, the Wigner Centre will host CERN equipment that will substantially extend the capabilities of the LHC Computing Grid Tier-0 activities and provide the opportunity for business continuity solutions to be implemented. This contract is initially until 31 December 2015, with the possibility of up to four, one year, extensions thereafter.

CERN supports new business incubation centre in the UK 23.04.2012

CERN and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council announce the launch of a new Business Incubation Centre (BIC) at the STFC’s Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus. The centre will provide a new technology transfer opportunity to bridge the gap between basic science and industry, supporting businesses and entrepreneurs in taking innovative technologies related to high energy physics from technical concept to market reality.

LHC physics data taking gets underway at new record collision energy of 8TeV 05.04.2012

At 3:38 CEST this morning, the LHC shift crew declared ‘stable beams’ as two 4 TeV proton beams were brought into collision at the LHC’s four interaction points. This signals the start of physics data taking by the LHC experiments for 2012.  The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine’s discovery potential considerably.

First laureate for Collide@CERN-Geneva Prize announced 29.03.2012

The first Collide@CERN-Geneva prize in Dance and Performance was today awarded by jury to the 47-year-old Swiss-born dancer and choreographer Gilles Jobin for his proposal to explore through interventions and dance the relationship between mind and body at the world's largest particle physics laboratory.

CERN welcomes its first artist in residence 12.03.2012

Creative collisions have begun at CERN with the arrival of Julius von Bismarck as the laboratory’s first Collide@CERN artist in residence. A rising star of the international arts scene, von Bismarck will team up with theoretical physicist James Wells as he works alongside the lab’s engineers and scientists for the next two months before moving to the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, Austria for the second part of his residency. Von Bismarck and Wells will give a public presentation in CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation on 21 March. Doors open at 6.45pm.

A major contract has been signed for the supply of solar panels derived from CERN technology 09.03.2012

At Geneva International Airport today SRB Energy delivered the first of the solar panels that will form one of the largest solar energy systems of Switzerland. Ultimately, some 300 high-temperature solar thermal panels will cover a surface of 1200 square metres on the roof of the airport's main terminal building. The panels, which will be used to keep the buildings warm during the winter and cool in the summer, are derived from vacuum technology developed at CERN for particle accelerators.

CERN experiment makes spectroscopic measurement of antihydrogen 07.03.2012

In a paper published online today by the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration at CERN reports an important milestone on the way to measuring the properties of antimatter atoms. This follows news reported in June last year that the collaboration had routinely trapped antihydrogen atoms for long periods of time. ALPHA’s latest advance is the next important milestone on the way to being able to make precision comparisons between atoms of ordinary matter and atoms of antimatter, thereby helping to unravel one of the deepest mysteries in particle physics and perhaps understanding why a Universe of matter exists at all.

3rd CinéGlobe international film festival at CERN 06.03.2012

CERN will be hosting the CinéGlobe international film festival from 27 March to 1 April. This 3rd edition will see 55 short films "inspired by science" in competition, together with fictional pieces and documentaries. Selected from a long list of 1400 short films from 107 countries, all the entrants have one thing in common – telling stories inspired by science and technology. The theme of this year's festival is "infinitely interconnected", casting the spotlight on how interconnected the modern world has become.

LHCb experiment squeezes the space for expected new physics 05.03.2012

Results presented by the LHCb collaboration this evening at the annual ‘Rencontres de Moriond’ conference, held this year in La Thuile, Italy, have put one of the most stringent limits to date on the current theory of particle physics, the Standard Model. LHCb tests the Standard Model by measuring extremely rare processes, in this case a decay pattern predicted to happen just three times out of every billion decays of a particle known as the Bs (B-sub-s) meson. Anything other than that would be evidence for new physics. Measuring the rate of this Bs decay has been a major goal of particle physics experiments in the past decade, with the limit on its decay rate being gradually improved by the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab, LHCb, and most recently CMS at CERN.

Big science teams up with big business to kick-start European cloud computing 01.03.2012

Today a consortium of leading IT providers and three of Europe’s biggest research centres (CERN, EMBL and ESA) announced a partnership to launch a European cloud computing platform. "Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud", will support the massive IT requirements of European scientists, and become available to governmental organisations and industry after an initial pilot phase.

Latest updates

ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso laboratory reports new measurement of neutrino time of flight consistent with the speed of light 16.03.2012

The ICARUS experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory has today reported a new measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso. The ICARUS measurement, using last year's short pulsed beam from CERN, indicates that the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light on their journey between the two laboratories. This is at odds with the initial measurement reported by OPERA last September.

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