European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN

CERN is the world’s leading, highly diverse research centre for particle and nuclear physics. The organisation’s 20 member states collaborate in global research projects which are carried out on a larger scale than would be possible for a single European country and are focused on the basic structure of matter and fundamental interactions in nature. CERN’s latest major project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is the world’s largest scientific instrument. It came online in 2010 and is expected to cast light on what may seem obvious in everyday life: the origins of mass. In addition to being a particle physics laboratory, CERN also functions as a major platform for technological development.