In pictures: CERN in 2014

A look back at the some of the stories in the laboratory's 60th anniversary year

It has been a busy 60th anniversary year for CERN, in which – says CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer in his end-of-year message to CERN people – the laboratory has successfully carried the message of "Science for Peace".

January

In January, the ASACUSA experiment at CERN produced a beam of antihydrogen atoms for the first time and the Israeli flag was hoisted to join the other 20 flags of the organization’s member states. 

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The ASACUSA experiment (Image: Yasunori Yamakazi/CERN)

February

In February, teams of engineers and technicians opened access to all the splices on the LHC, ready for consolidation for running at higher energies in 2015.

Members of the Superconducting Magnets And Circuits Consolidation team (SMACC) celebrate in style after opening up the last LHC splice (Image: Michael Struik/CERN)

March

CERN celebrated 25 years since the invention of the World Wide Web. The web was invented in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and developed to facilitate information sharing between particle physicists. March also saw the start of a digitisation project to restore CERN's photo archives, which enlisted the help of the public to identify several mystery pictures from the laboratory's past. 

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View from the floor of the two walls M1 and M2 of the LHCb Muon detector (Image: CERN)

April, May

In April, the LHCb collaboration published an unambiguous observation of an exotic particle that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model – an exotic hadron. The last of 27,000 shunts was added to connections between superconducting magnets on the LHC. The shunt provides an alternate path for the current in the event that the magnet comes out of its superconducting state. In May, ATLAS was fitted with a new subdetector. 

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A team of physicists and engineers inspect the subdetector before its insertion into the ATLAS experiment (Image: Claudia Marcelloni De Oliveira/CERN)

June, July, August

In summer, a new exhibition breathed new life into CERN's first accelerator, the SynchrocyclotronCERN’s ALPHA experiment measured the charge of antihydrogen atoms and civil engineering began for the AWAKE experiment

The accelerating cavity of CERN's first accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron (Image: Jacques Herve Fichet/CERN)
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Construction work is already underway at CERN for the AWAKE project (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

September, October

"CERN and science for peace" - an account of the history of CERN (Video: CERN)

In September, the official celebrations for the laboratory's 60th anniversary took place at CERN, and the laboratory also hosted its second TEDxCERN event on the theme Charting the future with scienceThe AMS experiment reported new results on the flux of cosmic rays in space, and CERN welcomed two groups of high-school students to conduct experiments at the T9 beam line as part of the beamline for schools project.

Accelerators
Detector physicist Cenk Yildiz (centre, white helmet) explains the experimental setup at the T9 beamline to students on the beamline for schools project (Image: Guillaume Jeanneret/CERN)
View of the AMS detector on the International Space Station (Image: NASA)

November, December

Towards the end of the year, CERN made data from real collision events at the LHC openly available to all through its Open Data Portal and the CERN Council selected Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti as the Organization’s next Director-General, with her 5-year mandate to begin on 1 January 2016.

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The LHC tunnel at the point where the accelerator joins the beam dump at point 6 (Image: CERN)

This month, LHC teams have been cooling the accelerator to below 4 K, and gearing up for running at higher energy in 2015.