
Several important achievements in particle physics have been made through experiments at CERN. The convention was gradually ratified by the 12 founding Member States: Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. Founding membersĪt the sixth session of the CERN Council, which took place in Paris from 29 June – 1 July 1953, the convention establishing the organization was signed, subject to ratification, by 12 states. Therefore, the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics ( Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules), which better describes the research being performed there. The laboratory was originally devoted to the study of atomic nuclei, but was soon applied to higher-energy physics, concerned mainly with the study of interactions between subatomic particles.
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Edoardo Amaldi was the general secretary of CERN at its early stages when operations were still provisional, while the first Director-General (1954) was Felix Bloch. ĬERN's first president was Sir Benjamin Lockspeiser. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the abbreviation could have become the awkward OERN, and Werner Heisenberg said that this could "still be CERN even if the name is ".

The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Organization for Nuclear Research') in 1954. During these early years, the council worked at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Niels Bohr before moving to its present site in Geneva. The acronym CERN originally represented the French words for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Council for Nuclear Research'), which was a provisional council for building the laboratory, established by 12 European governments in 1952. The convention establishing CERN was ratified on 29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe. The 12 founding member states of CERN in 1954 CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. As researchers require remote access to these facilities, the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub. The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyze data from experiments, as well as simulate events. CERN is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. ĬERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research - consequently, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. In 2016, CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.

The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory in 2019, it had 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.
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Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only non-European full member. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN ( / s ɜːr n/ French pronunciation: Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
