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A monorail from CERN's Large Electron Positron collider (LEP, for short). It ran around the 27km tunnel, transporting equipment and personnel. With its 27-kilometre circumference, LEP was the largest electron-positron accelerator ever built and 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.

Boxes of bubble chamber film showing photographs of particle collisions. The particle tracks were then analysed on scanning tables (see object CERN-OBJ-DE-029). We have a selection of bubble chamber film available for loan, including some from the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC).

<2> full boxes of light guides. Light guides like this are used to carry signals to the electronics for recording.

Before the days of electronic detectors, visual techniques were used to detect particles, using detectors such as spark chambers and bubble chambers. This plexiglass lens was used to focus the image of tracks so they could be photographed.

A drift tube from the Linac 1. This was the first tank of the linear accelerator Linac1, the injection system for the Proton Synchrotron, It ran for 34 years (1958 - 1992). Protons entered at the far end and were accelerated between the copper drift tubes by an oscillating electromagnetic field. The field flipped 200 million times a second (200 MHz) so the protons spent 5 nanoseconds crossing a drift tube and a gap. Moving down the tank, the tubes and gaps had to get longer as the protons gained speed. The tank accelerated protons from 500 KeV to 10 MeV. Linac1 was also used to accelerate deutrons and alpha particles for the Intersecting Storage Rings and oxygen and sulpher ions for the Super Proton Synchrotron heavy ion programme.

This is a collision region from the world’s first proton collider, the Intersecting Storage Rings. The ISR was used at CERN from 1971-84 to study proton-proton collisions at the highest energy then available (60GeV). When operational, ISR collision regions were surrounded by detectors as shown in the photo. In 1972, the surprising discovery of fragments flying out sideways from head-on proton-proton collisions was the first evidence of quark-quark scattering inside the colliding protons . This was similar to Rutherford’s observation in 1911 of alpha particles scattering off the tiny nucleus inside atoms of gold. The ISR beamtubes had to be as empty as outer space, a vacuum 100 000 times better than other CERN machines at the time.

The 3.70 metre Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) was dismantled on 9 August 1984. One of the biggest detectors in the world, it produced direct visual recording of particle tracks. 6.3 million photos of interactions were taken with the chamber in the course of its existence.