1077 



U.S. PARTICIPATION AT CERN 131 



exploration and realization of economically interesting nuclear physics 

 applications, has had a hard time rising from political and economic, na- 

 tionalistic and factional controversy, and has since been formally in- 

 tegrated into the European Community. 



CERN today has 13 member states who participate in the running and 

 the financing of the laboratory according to a convention and a financial 

 protocol signed in 1953; it has been amended several times since without 

 changing the basic spirit or setup. Article I creates the organization with 

 its seat in Geneva; significantly. Article II immediately states that "the 

 organization shall provide for collaboration among European states in 

 nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character, and in 

 research essentially related thereto. The organization shall have no con- 

 cern with work for military requirements, and the results of its ex- 

 perimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made 

 generally available." 



CERN's mission has been principally the design, building, and opera- 

 tion of particle accelerators capable of realizing these research aims, the 

 execution of major experimental programs on elementary particle 

 research topics, and the assembling of a team of theoretical physicists 

 capable of stimulating and interpreting experimental work. The 

 laboratory today operates a proton synchrotron (PS) with an energy of 

 26 GeV (since 1959) and a proton synchrotron (SPS) that reaches 450 

 GeV (1976); these have recently been modified to also accelerate an- 

 tiprotons in the opposite direction, so as to make collisions of protons 

 and antiprotons traveling at equal but opposite velocities possible (pp 

 Collider); it also operates the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), which 

 collide protons traveling in two interlaced rings almost head-on. For 

 many years, starting in 1957, there was also a vigorous medium energy 

 program centered on the SC (Synchro-cyclotron), which accelerated 

 protons to 0.6 GeV. Much of the present CERN activity is directed 

 toward the design and operation of the LEP project discussed in the pre- 

 vious section— the first excursion of CERN into the realm of electron 

 machines, hitherto dominated by the Stanford Linear Accelerator 

 Center (SLAC) in California and the German Electron Synchrotron 

 Laboratory (DESY) in Hamburg." 



Among these projects, two do not at present have an equivalent in the 

 United States, the ISR and the pp Collider. The antiprotons that feed the 

 Collider can also be decelerated to permit low-energy pp (proton- 

 antiproton) interactions in the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), 

 another unique facility. The huge LEP project, on the other hand, will 

 have a U.S. competitor, the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC), for its first 

 (50 GeV) phase; but machine parameters and readiness of access make 



