CERN and Switzerland: Seven decades of close collaboration and some lesser-known facts

With seven universities and labs participating in a broad physics programme, including three of the four LHC experiments, more exotic projects like CLOUD or GBAR or future plans like HL-LHC and FCC alongside its own research projects, Switzerland is firmly rooted in the particle physics landscape of the world. It’s been a member of CERN from day one – or should that be day zero? The country has played a role in shaping the international laboratory before it was even founded. Most histories of CERN trace the idea of a European laboratory for the peaceful exploration of the constituents of the Universe back to one particular speech: Winston Churchill’s famous call for a “United States of Europe”, given in September 1946 to an attentive crowd at the University of Zurich.

At the official anniversary ceremony, which took place at CERN on 1 October, President Viola Amherd also referred to this spirit of peaceful cooperation: "The institution we are celebrating today stands for humanity's thirst for knowledge. At the same time, it is a strong example of the successes that come from states working together rather than against each other. (...) It is a spirit that we urgently need on our continent and elsewhere.”

In the early days of drafting the idea of a European lab for nuclear research, several different places were put forward as candidate sites. Geneva, already the site of other international organisations, was a natural contender, but it had strong competition in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Longjumeau near Paris and Arnhem in the Netherlands also featured on the shortlist. Paris and Copenhagen were withdrawn relatively quickly, but it was a tough race between Geneva and Arnhem, which Geneva finally won in the council session in October 1952 because of its central European location “in a small, politically neutral country, with an established tradition of hosting international organisations[1]” and because “it had a particularly beautiful natural environment”.

However, just because founding fathers of research labs are in favour of an idea doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody agrees. Actually, a group of people – the Geneva Communist Party, to be precise, backed by a large fraction of the population – disagreed so strongly that they launched an initiative “prohibiting the establishment of any nuclear physics institute in the canton of Geneva.” On the one hand they were afraid of health risks for the local population because of the accelerator, on the other of risks to Switzerland’s neutrality. They collected enough signatures for a very Swiss procedure: a referendum. This in turn must have led to the first of many of CERN’s communication campaigns, with people from academia and canton officials touring communal halls and presenting their arguments in favour of the lab. These arguments have made it into the CERN convention by Swiss demand and remain two of its sturdiest pillars: research made at CERN is fundamental research without any military purpose, and all results will be openly published. At the end of June 1953, the people of Geneva cast their referendum votes, with 16,539 votes in favour of CERN's location in the canton to 7,332 against. The deal was made.

For a short while, the vineyards of Dardagny were put forward as possible site, but Meyrin won out. In a history of the municipality, they make it clear how proud they are of their famous, if slightly nerdy, neighbour and its people: “Their presence has contributed, and continues to contribute, to the multiculturalism of the municipality. Meyrin benefits from the economic spin-offs and reputation of CERN. Nobel Prize winners have worked here. The Web was invented here, and important figures such as François Mitterrand and Pope John Paul II have visited.”[2]

After the referendum the CERN Convention was signed on 1 July, the first people working on the Proton Synchrotron arrived in Geneva. They had to set up a workshop in the University of Geneva because CERN didn’t exist. The group working on the Synchro Cyclotron SC, CERN’s very first accelerator, were even put into a villa in Cointrin, making it the first CERN “headquarters”. In fact, this villa still exists on the premises of Geneva airport – you can actually see it from the road leading to the airport – and goes by the names or “Chateau Aralp” or “Chateau Cointrin”, depending on who you ask[3].

The magnets developed and tested in the Institute of Physics at the University of Geneva are still going strong in the PS after all these years, by the way – just one example of how the lab CERN uses and reuses its old equipment and infrastructure as best as it can. Another is the world’s largest accelerator tunnel, dug for the Large Electron-Positron Collider LEP in Swiss and French soil in the 1980s, which has served physics for more than 40 years and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

While scientists were working all over Geneva on the technologies of the first CERN accelerators, the first earth was turned in the rolling fields of Meyrin on 17 May 1954. “The ceremony, which was not official, was attended by local members of the CERN staff, by cantonal authorities, and by the Council chairman Robert Valeur. No speeches were made, and no journalists reported the historic event,” the ‘History of CERN‘ notes. After a record construction time, the SC was commissioned and first staff moved into the CERN buildings in 1957.

If you have ever been to CERN, one of those buildings stands out. Architecturally very much a product of the post-war years, Building 60 towers over the main building, the cafeteria and its terraces. White and square and relatively unremarkable to the untrained eye, it was until recently home to the enlarged Directorate, which had to move out for an extensive renovation. This building represents another close tie to Switzerland – its architects are the Swiss father and son Rudolf and Peter Steiger, who designed the whole first ensemble of buildings on the CERN site. It is now considered one of the finest examples of modern 20th-century architecture in Geneva and alongside the impressive headquarters of the World Health Organisation and the International Labour Organisation forms an “extraordinary heritage ensemble” of the architecture of international Geneva. Once it’s cleared of asbestos and other material that doesn’t adhere to modern safety standards it will become home of the CERN management again in 2025.

After all this talk of putting down roots, of brick and mortar and deep tunnels let’s finish with a connection that flies higher than most – 400 kilometres high, to be precise. An experiment placed on the outer shell of the International Space Station ISS searches for antimatter and dark matter in space. Orbiting the Earth at 16 000 kilometres per second, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment monitors the composition and hit rate of cosmic rays very precisely, thanks in part due to silicon detectors in the first- and second-generation trackers of AMS produced by the University of Geneva and ETH Zurich. AMS, whose control room is located at CERN, is scheduled to be up there taking data as long as the ISS is operational.

For more fun facts of Swiss-CERN history check back again at the next anniversary…

Barbara Warmbein

[1] A. Hermann et al., History of CERN 1987 https://cds.cern.ch/record/109154?ln=en

[2] https://www.meyrin.ch/sites/default/files/inline-files/1954.-le-cern-sinstalle-a-meyrin.pdf

[3] http://www.pionnair-ge.com/spip1/spip.php?article377