North and South poles

Minute videos snapshot

Why does the earth's North magnetic pole move towards Russia with a speed of 55km/year? And why are the geographic and magnetic poles located in different points in the first place? Finally, how is the earth's magnetic field related to the North lights? Watch a 3 minute video.

The basics of the Higgs Boson explained

...and more annimations by TEDed can be found here

All TEDxCERN videos here!

Replacing a magnet?

snapshot of the cern video

Magnets are important elements of an accelerator. They steer the beem to keep it on track. They are however often radiated due synchrotron radiation and become radioactive. They also fail from time to time and the result is a tedius replacement procedure as seen in this video.

55:20 min. / 03 December 1987 / © 1987 CERN

What happened to antimatter?

snapshot of the you-tube video

Particles come in pairs, which is why there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the universe. Yet scientists have not been able to detect antimatter in the visible universe. Where is this missing particle? CERN scientist Rolf Landua returns to the seconds after the Big Bang to explain the disparity that allows humans to exist today.

A video by Rolf Landua of CERN

Destination Universe

Image illustrated front-cover of CERN leaflet

This brochure illustrates the incredible journey of a proton as he winds his way through the CERN accelerator chain and ends up inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is CERN's flagship particle accelerator which can collide protons together at close to the speed of light, creating circumstances like those just seconds after the Big Bang.

ATLAS Factsheet

Image illustrated front-cover of ATLAS Factsheet leaflet

Nicholas Christofilos

An elevator maintenance engineer who invented the concept of the "alternating gradients focusing" back in 1949. It was thanks to his method that the 28GeV Proton Synchrotron could be built with a realistic size and badget at CERN back in the 50's. Eversince all Synchrotron particle accelerators are based on his concept of "strong focusing".

Christofilos contribution to the accelerator technology has been thoroughly documented by A.K.Melissinos of the Astronomy Department, University of Rochester, USA. The early development of strong focusing by Christofilos has been recognised in a Physics Review article by his Brookhaven National Laboratory colleagues.

Christofilos second major contribution in particle Physics came through a military programme he started under the code name Astron ("the star" in Greek); it concerned the creation of a virtual chamber made of relativistic electrons for the containment of plasma (this is an essential step towards the fusion process) as described in a text by E.Coleman.

Christofilos was also the director of an other significant military project that aimed at the experimental verification of his idea; if a large number of relativistic particles could be injected at specific points in the Earth's magnetic field they could create a "third" Van Allen belt with significant implications in radar reception and communications. Watch a US navy video that has become unclassified.

Christofilos passed away suddenly in 1972. His death came, allegedly, the night after it was announced to him that his child-project Argos would no longer be funded by the US Military programmes. His last very important contribution is believed to be the extreme low frequency communication system. The system used an antenna that extended hundreds of kilometers to allow communication with submerged submarines of the US Navy. His system had been operational until the early 90's by the US Navy.

Arts Collide

The art beyond Particle collision! See what artists at CERN are up to... [more]

The LHC factsheet

Image illustrated front-cover of LHC leaflet

Welcome back! I hope you find this page interesting. Feel free to contact me with comments or other interesting material you found. K.Papastergiou

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This website is maintained by CERN guide Konstantinos Papastergiou. It serves as after-visit reading resource for guests I have already guided through CERN. Unless otherwise stated the pictures in this website are property of the respective cited websites.