Feature Archives – Page 29 of 140

CERN strengthens ties with South Asia

In 2010, the CERN Council approved a radical shift in membership policy that opened full membership to non-European states.

Injecting new life into the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most famous and powerful of all CERN’s machines, colliding intense beams of protons at an energy of 13 TeV. But its success relies on a series of smaller mac...

ITER’s massive magnets enter production

As Matthew Chalmers reported in 2017, completion of the first toroidal-field coil for ITER demonstrates niobium-tin superconductor technology on a gigantic scale.

Powering the field forward

Particle physicists try to understand the environment that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang by studying the behaviour of particles at high energies. Early studies relied on cosmic rays...

Unique magnets

To identify particles emerging from high-energy interactions between a beam and a fixed target, or between two counter-rotating beams, experimental physicists need to measure the particle tracks with ...

Souped up RF

Behind the size, complexity and physics goals of particle accelerators such as the LHC lies a simple physics principle worked out by Maxwell more than 150 years ago: when a charged particle passes th...

Get on board with EASITrain

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes won his Nobel prize back in 1913 two years after the discovery of superconductivity; Georg Bednorz and Alexander Müller won theirs in 1987, just a year after discovering high-t...

Superconductors and particle physics entwined

Superconductivity is a mischievous phenomenon. Countless superconducting materials were discovered following Onnes’ 1911 breakthrough, but none with the right engineering properties. Even today, mor...