CERN's 60th Birthday

http://t.co/zU9b7V4idL by @ulaulaman about #CERN60
The day to celebrate CERN's birthday is arrived:
The convention establishing CERN was ratified on 29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe. The acronym CERN originally stood in French for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 12 European governments in 1952. 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.
The most recent discovery at the laboratories is the Higgs boson (or a particle that seems it), but there are some others successes in the CERN's history:

1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber;
1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments;
1989: The determination of the number of light neutrino families at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) operating on the Z boson peak;
1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment;
1999: The discovery of direct CP violation in the NA48 experiment;
2010: The isolation of 38 atoms of antihydrogen;
2011: Maintaining antihydrogen for over 15 minutes;

There are two Nobel Prizes directly connected to the CERN:

1984: to Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer for
their decisive contributions to the large project which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of the weak interaction
1992: to Georges Charpak for
his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber, a breakthrough in the technique for exploring the innermost parts of matter
On CERN's webcast you can see the official ceremony

Image via ATLAS on Google Plus

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