CERN
international organization which operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also called European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN (; French pronunciation: [sɛʁn]; Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, a western suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. It comprises 25 member states. Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only full member geographically out of Europe. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.
The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory; in 2024, it had 2,704 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,406 users from institutions in more than 80 countries. In 2016, CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.
CERN'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. CERN is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. 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” enters the record as international organization which operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what CERN, international and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42944. VIAF identifies the subject as 234145033. The Library of Congress control number is n80098692. Authority coordinates are 46.234, 6.049. 2 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 5 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 2013, 2024 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “CERN” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.