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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (official name), commonly known by the acronym CERN (provisional acronym used in 1952, which responds to the French name Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, i.e. the European Council for the Nuclear research), 2 is the largest particle physics research laboratory in the world.

It is located in Switzerland near the border with France, between the commune of Saint-Genis-Pouilly (in the Department of Ain) and the commune of Meyrin (in the canton of Geneva).

As an international facility, CERN is not officially under French or Swiss jurisdiction. Member States jointly and annually contribute CHF 1 000 million (approximately €664 million, USD 1 000 million). 3

The center was awarded in 2013 with the Prince of Asturias Prize for scientific and technical research with Peter Higgs, and François Englert.

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Founded in 1954 by 12 European countries, CERN is today a model of international scientific collaboration and one of the most important research centers in the world. It currently has 21 Member States, which share funding and decision-making in the organization. In addition, 28 other non-member countries participate with scientists from 220 institutes and universities on projects at CERN using their facilities. Of these non-member countries, eight States and organizations have observer quality, participating in Council meetings.

CERN's first major scientific success occurred in 1984, when Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of W and Z bosons. In 1992 it was the turn of Georges Charpak «For the invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multi-thread proportional chamber».

CERN is located in Switzerland, near Geneva, and close to the French border. It has a series of particle accelerators, including the, already dismantled, LEP (large electron-positron Collider, large electron-positron collider). At present the LHC (Large Hadron Collider, Large Hadron Collider) has been built, a proton-proton accelerator intended to operate at higher energy and luminosity (more collisions per second will occur) of 27 km circumference and constitutes The largest particle accelerator built to date. Financed with the collaboration of 60 countries, it made possible confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. The first test of the latter was successfully held on September 10, 2008.

CERN's success is not only its ability to produce scientific results of great interest, but also the development of new technologies both computer and industrial. Among the first highlights in 1990 the invention of the World Wide Web by scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, but do not forget the development and maintenance of important mathematical libraries (CERNLIB now called ROOT) used for many years In most scientific centers, or also mass storage systems (the LHC will store a volume of data of the order of several PB each year). By the end of 2010, CERN's executives announced that they had managed to produce and capture antimatter atoms for a period of more than a tenth of a second. This fact is very important for science as it opens up a field that, at least in practice, was unknown and could provide energy in immense quantities.