Feature Archives – Page 5 of 125

The foundations of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope

Astronomers scale new summit

The world’s largest optical/near-infrared telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile, will bring mysteries such as dark energy into focus.

A variant of the black-hole accretion disk seen in the film Interstellar

Building Gargantua

Oliver James describes the visual effects which produced the black hole in Interstellar.

FPGAs that speak your language

FPGAs can now be programmed in C++ and Java, bringing machine learning and complex algorithms within the scope of trigger-level analysis.

The interior of a radio-frequency cavity

The rise of French particle physics

Founded 80 years ago, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) is one of Europe’s largest research institutions.

L’intérieur d’une cavité de radiofréquence

L’essor de la physique des particules en France

Fondé il y a 80 ans, le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), en France, est l’une des plus importantes institutions de recherche en Europe.

Accelerating magnet technology

Superconducting magnet technology has fuelled some of the greatest discoveries in high-energy physics and is at the core of existing and next-generation circular particle accelerators, writes Luca Bot...

LEP’s electroweak leap

In the autumn of 1989 the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) delivered the first of several results that still dominate the landscape of particle physics today.

A quadrupole next to one of the long dipole magnets in LEP

The greatest lepton collider

LEP was the highest energy e+e– collider ever built, with levels of precision that remain unsurpassed in accelerator physics. Former CERN director of accelerators Steve Myers tells LEP’s story fro...