CERN in winter

16 February 2000

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In this aerial photograph taken in January 1979, snow-cover picks out the details of the main site of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in the foreground. The city of Geneva lies beyond, at the end of Lac Leman (or Lake Geneva), with the Alps and Mont Blanc in the background. Clearly visible on the CERN site are two rings. The upper one, just below the centre of the image, is the tunnel of the Proton Synchrotron (PS), which has now been running for 40 years. The lower ring formed the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), a pioneering proton-proton collider, which ran from 1971 to 1984. CERN will see head-on collisions between protons once again, but at much higher energies, in 2005, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is scheduled to start operation.

Credit: CERN Photo