Vice-Chancellor visits CERN

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Howard Newby has visited CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to see the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in action.

Travelling with Professor Themis Bowcock and Professor Phil Allport from the Department of Physics, the Vice-Chancellor was invited to the centre in Switzerland to see the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which allows scientists to study what the Universe looked like billionths of a second after it was created. 

Physicists from the University have been involved in two of the four major LHC experiments at CERN, ATLAS and LHCb, and hope that the results will answer fundamental questions such as what dark matter and dark energy are and whether there are extra dimensions of space and time.