In this combined tour you will have the opportunity to visit CERN's first particle accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron (SC), having been in operation between 1957 and 1990 and now serving as a unique experience which takes visitors back in time to find out about the oigins of CERN while also learning about the basic principles of particle acceleration.

In addition to that, you will have the opportunity to learn about the largest particle detector at CERN, the ATLAS detector. Find out what a particle detector does (spoiler: it detects particles), why we need them, how they work, and what we have discovered with them.

In this tour you will visit a very special place: the only place in the universe where antimatter is created. In some sense, this research facility takes us back to a time, seconds after the big bang, when the universe still consisted of roughly equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. However, there was a tiny difference between these amounts. And this difference is the reason why not all the matter in the universe was "cancelled out" by anti-matter. To this day, we have no clue what this tiny difference between matter and anti-matter is. And as long as we don't know this we cannot answer one of the most fundamental questions of humankind : Why are we here? 

If you want to find out how researchers at CERN try to answer this fundamental question, and if you want to see an operational particle accelerator, sign up for this tour.

Careful: This tour is not possible if you are pregnant, and please note that it involves stairs.

In the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful accelerator in the world, particles collide at a mind-boggling rate of 40 million collisions per second. And each of these collisions provides precious data about the mysteries of our universe. But how do we process and store data at this insane rate (for comparison: the amount of data produced by the LHC experiments in one second is in the same order of magnitude as the amount of data uploaded to YouTube in one day)? And where does that happen?

To find out about all of this and to see a real, operational data center, sign up for this tour.