The beginning of LEP

13 September 2000



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On 13 September 1983, the presidents of France and Switzerland came to CERN, Europe's research centre for particle physics, for the ground-breaking ceremony for a new particle accelerator, the Large Electron Positron accelerator, LEP. The machine was to be the world's largest scientific instrument, occupying a tunnel 27 km in circumference, lying under both French and Swiss land on either side of the border near Geneva. In the central group in this image from the ceremony, we see from the left, LEP Project Director Emilio Picasso (leaning forward slightly), President Francois Mitterand of France, President Pierre Aubert of Switzerland, and Herwig Schopper, then Director General of CERN. LEP started up six years later, in August 1989, and is due to be shut down in November 2000 to make way for the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) .

Credit: CERN Photo