Belgian universities help modernise the CERN
The CERN institute in Switzerland is becoming a little more Belgian, or at least some of the technology is.
Researchers from a multitude of Belgian universities (a total of 40 scientists are involved) are in the laborious process of developing thousands of modules that are part of a tracker that traces the trajectory of particles created in the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator in the world, located in the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.
The two universities in Brussels (ULB and VUB) are not the only Belgian academic institutions in on the action; those of Ghent, Antwerp and Louvain-la-Neuve are also contributing their expertise. At the moment, though, that knowhow is staying (and growing) at the VUB’s Etterbeek campus. The Large Hadron Collider will be put to sleep, as it were, between 2026 and 2030, for the new tracker to be installed.
Did you know that Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert received the Nobel prize in 2013 together with Peter Higgs for having discovered the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson?
Another fine example of Belgian scientific expertise changing the world one discovery at a time.