The official inauguration ceremony of the new CERN’s particle accelerator, the LHC, took place on October 21^st, with the participation of Heads of State and Government, as well as on CERN’s Member States Ministries, among other important visitors. Within this context, Efacec has participated with a great satisfaction in this important ceremony, as an Official Sponsor.

Portugal has been represented in the inauguration ceremony during the day 21^st by a delegation chaired by Professor Mariano Gago, Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education.

Efacec was also present in the inauguration ceremony carried out during the day 21^st, as well as in the LHC Award Day, a ceremony that was carried out in the previous day, by the presence of Alberto Barbosa, Mário Clemêncio and José Manuel Fonseca, who have integrated the Portuguese delegation chaired by Professor Mariano Gago.

The Ambassador of Portugal in Switzerland has participated in this delegation, as well as the representatives of LIP - Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics), of FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Sciences and Technology Foundation), of ISQ - Instituto de Soldadura e Qualidade (Soldering and Quality Institute) and of the A. Silva Matos company, beyond the Portuguese delegation for the Council of CERN.


Some information about CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an    intergovernmental organization with 20 Member States. It has its headquarters

in Geneva but straddles the Swiss-French border. Its objective is to facilitate advanced collaboration among European States in the field of high energy particle physics research. To this end CERN designs, constructs and runs the necessary particle accelerators and the associated experimental areas.

Three scientists from CERN received Nobel Prizes, awarded by the Swedish Academy. Besides this, CERN also attracts other Nobel Laureates wishing to use its facilities. At present, approximately 9000 physicists from research institutes world-wide use the CERN installations for their experiments.

Although CERN has been using several accelerators for its experiments, especially the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) which ran from 1989 to 2000, scientists were looking further into the future to continue their experiments in the domain of particle physics. As a consequence, they imagined re-using the LEP’s tunnel, a 27 km underground ring, to house a more powerful machine.

This idea led to the construction of the most sophisticated and powerful accelerator ever built in the world, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), functioning at -271.3 ºC (1.9 K).

The LHC allows to accelerate and collide proton beams with an extremely high energy. The unprecedented energy may even reveal some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of!

By this initiative, the scientists expect to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics, namely related to matter’s mass, as well as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. The study of these subjects is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.