A wooden model of the ALEPH experiment and its cavern. ALEPH was one of 4 experiments at CERN's 27km Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) that ran from 1989 to 2000. During 11 years of research, LEP's experiments provided a detailed study of the electroweak interaction. Measurements performed at LEP also proved that there are three – and only three – generations of particles of matter. LEP was closed down on 2 November 2000 to make way for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel. The cavern and detector are in separate locations - the cavern is stored at CERN and the detector is temporarily on display in Glasgow physics department. Both are available for loan.

The ATLAS transition radiation tracker is made of 300'000 straw tubes, up to 144cm long. Filled with a gas mixture and threaded with a wire, each straw is a complete mini-detector in its own right. An electric field is applied between the wire and the outside wall of the straw. As particles pass through, they collide with atoms in the gas, knocking out electrons. The avalanche of electrons is detected as an electrical signal on the wire in the centre. The tracker plays two important roles. Firstly, it makes more position measurements, giving more dots for the computers to join up to recreate the particle tracks. Also, together with the ATLAS calorimeters, it distinguishes between different types of particles depending on whether they emit radiation as they make the transition from the surrounding foil into the straws.

One of the building blocks of the CMS Silicon Tracker: a part of the detector that reconstructs the trajectories of charge particles emerging from the proton-proton collisions. A lightweight structure, made mostly of carbon fibre, supports silicon detectors and their readout electronics. These detectors generate an electrical pulse when they are traversed by a charged particle, and they are segmented into fine strips (in this case the strips are 180 microns wide, about the size of a human hair) that collect those pulses, such that the position of the strip provides a coordinate on the particle trajectory.

The crystals used in CMS’s electromagnetic calorimeter may look like simple bricks of glass, but they are in fact mostly metal and are heavier than steel! Lead tungstate crystal with a touch of oxygen in this crystalline form is highly transparent and scintillates when electrons and photons pass through it. This means it produces light in proportion to the particle’s energy. CMS contains nearly 80’000 such crystals, each of which took two days to grow. This technology developed at CERN has applications in medical imaging, for example improving cancer diagnosis. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).