Herwig Schopper in 1982, when he was CERN Director-General, in front of a map of the LEP collider and its experiments. (CERN)
A special symposium will take place this afternoon in CERN’s main auditorium to highlight the great adventure of the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider and to celebrate the 90th birthday of the former CERN Director-General, Herwig Schopper.
The story of LEP started at the beginning of the 1980s. The construction of the huge collider, which was to be the largest in the world, and of its four experiments was approved in 1981. A few months earlier, Herwig Schopper became CERN’s Director-General and he put all his efforts into winning approval for the big machine, and then carrying out the project. From 1983 to 1988, the most formidable civil engineering enterprise in the history of CERN took place with the construction of the 27-km tunnel that now houses the LHC. Meanwhile, physics collaborations of unprecedented size were put in place to develop four huge particle detectors. Many technical challenges had to be overcome to build the collider and its experiments. The physics results obtained during the first phase of LEP, between 1989 and 1994, helped to establish the Standard Model as the theory for particle physics and enabled predictions to be made for new physics.
At the symposium, former CERN director Horst Wenninger will talk about the support for the LEP machine and describe CERN’s technical involvement with the collaborations of the four LEP experiments during the collider’s construction period. He will aslo describe the preparations for the LEP energy upgrade and for the LHC during the firs phase of LEP operation (LEP I).
Former theory division leader, John Ellis, who participated in the pioneering studies of possible physics with LEP, the LHC and CLIC, will talk about the ascent of the Standard Model during the LEP period.
Finally, Herwig Schopper will cover the human aspects of the story, explaining the conditions through which the success of LEP was achieved and the spirit created at CERN to enable such a success.
The symposium will take place at CERN main auditorium, between 3.30pm and 6.30pm.
You can follow it by webcast at: www.cern.ch/webcast.