CERN accelerators

Find out when CERN's accelerators were commissioned and built – and when beams circulated inside them for the first time.

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10 09, 2008
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events/the-lhc-starts-up

At 10.28am on 10 September 2008 a beam of protons is successfully steered around the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. The machine is ready to embark on a new era of discovery at the high-energy frontier.

LHC experiments address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the universe’s existence.

Explore the resources prepared for press.

11 05, 1957
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events/cerns-first-accelerator-the-synchrocyclotron-starts-up

The 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (SC), built in 1957, was CERN’s first accelerator. It provided beams for CERN’s first experiments in particle and nuclear physics. In 1964, this machine started to concentrate on nuclear physics alone, leaving particle physics to the newer and much more powerful Proton Synchrotron (PS).

The SC became a remarkably long-lived machine. In 1967, it started supplying beams for a dedicated unstable-ion facility called ISOLDE, which carries out research ranging from pure nuclear physics to astrophysics and medical physics. In 1990, ISOLDE was transferred to a different accelerator, and the SC closed down after 33 years of service.