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Article: Concrete - going undergound at CERN
- Article from:
- Concrete
- Article date:
- October 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright The Concrete Society Oct 2003. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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The Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) is the largest particle physics research centre in the world. It straddles the Franco-Swiss border west of Geneva at the foot of the Jura mountains (see Figure 1). The main instruments of research are circular accelerators buried about 100m underground. The two largest are the super proton synchrotron (SPS), which has a 6.9km circumference and was commissioned in 1977, and the large electron positron (LEP), which has a 26.7km circumference and was commissioned in 1989.
Investing in the future
Owing to advances in physics, CERN decided in 1994 to decommission the LEP and replace it with a large hadron collider (LHC). The LHC, due for ...