From art to touchscreens What research at Cern has to do with your everyday life

The Cern Nuclear Research Center in Geneva not only conducts complicated particle research. It has also had a hand in many applications used around the world.

In 1989, the British physicist and computer scientist Timothy John Berners-Lee presented an idea at Cern that would prove to be groundbreaking for Internet communication: a digital information network in which content is prepared as universal hypertext and linked with clickable links. Berners-Lee developed the necessary components within a few months: URLs such as info.cern.ch for web addresses, the page description language HTML for web pages, the technical protocol HTTP for links and the concept for a web browser.

In April 1993, Cern made the program code for the World Wide Web (WWW) available to the public, thus launching an unprecedented triumphant run for web technology.

The Danish engineer Bent Stumpe developed the forerunners of two other applications commonly used today at Cern back in the 1970s: He presented the first transparent touchscreen, on which - as with any smartphone or tablet today - touching the screen is enough to move things around. Using bowling balls, he built a tracking ball that could be used to move a cursor on the screen - a forerunner of the computer mouse.

In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at Cern, protons or ions are made to collide with high energy. Detectors measure which particles are produced. This technology is also used in medicine. In a PET scan, photons are measured, as in Cern detectors, which make cells or tissue visible that consume a lot of energy, including inflamed or tumor tissue. It differs from other imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which images tissue, organs and bones. PET scans (PET stands for positron emission tomography) use very little and practically harmless contrast medium.

In addition to diagnoses, treatments have also emerged from Cern inventions: At the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Center (HIT), for example, tumors in cancer patients have been irradiated with heavy ions and protons since 2009, which can destroy tumors deep in the body while sparing surrounding healthy tissue. This is particularly important for tumors in sensitive areas such as the base of the skull or the optic nerve.

It takes a lot of energy to set the LHC particle accelerator in motion. In order to lose as little as possible during transportation, Cern has co-developed superconductors made of metal alloys that have no resistance at temperatures of minus 270 degrees. The engineers are working on achieving this without such deep cooling.

This is interesting for the aircraft manufacturer Airbus. Airbus is working on a fuel cell propulsion system that generates energy from liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Superconductors could be used to transfer the energy to the engines without any losses. In the future, superconductors, which do not require such deep cooling, could also be used for fuel cells in everyday life, says Cern physicist Sascha Schmeling.

Very special programs are needed to precisely control the huge LHC machine and process all the data. Cern developments are used by the German stock exchange, for example, to be able to check who made which transaction in which nanosecond during electronic trading. The project is called "White Rabbit".

Cern and the Federal Printing Office in Berlin are discussing ways to improve the security of sensitive data using Cern methods.

Quantum technology is another field in which Cern is involved, for example in the construction of super-sensitive sensors. The Fraunhofer Institute writes: "Quantum technologies enable completely new, unprecedented applications in measurement technology, imaging, communication security and highly complex calculations." To develop these and other applications transparently and with others, Cern has taken the lead in a collaboration called the Quantum Technology Initiative.

Cern technology can be used to analyze paintings without damaging the works. For example, spectroscopic X-ray images can be used to identify deeper layers of paint or the composition of colors, allowing conclusions to be drawn about eras and individual painters. In 2020, for example, the Czech company InsightART was able to attribute a painting from a private collection to the Renaissance painter Raphael.

SDA