Microcosm (CERN)

The central section of the UA1 experiment on display at the Microcosm museum

Microcosm is a museum of particle physics located at CERN in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, near the town of Meyrin. It covers a broad range of particle physics topics, as well as the entire history of CERN. Exhibits include:

• explanations of the purpose of CERN and particle physics research in general.
• a mock-up, hands-on version of Rutherford's gold foil experiment
• a real-time cosmic ray detector
• a mock-up of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel
• models and explanations of current and future CERN experiments
• equipment from old experiments, including a large part of the UA1 detector, which ran at the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN from 1981 to 1984, and helped discover the W and Z bosons.

Microcosm garden

The Microcosm garden features several large components of old CERN experiments.

• Microcosm Garden.jpg

  The entire garden

• 

  The Big European Bubble Chamber

• LEP RF.jpg

  An RF cavity from the Large Electron-Positron Collider

• 

  Initial stages of an old particle accelerator

External links

• CERN Microcosm Webpage