60 years - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2014 - 90 Euro Cent

This special stamp is dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN in September 1954. With 21 member states, around 2,500 employees and over 11,000 visiting scientists from 85 nations, CERN, located near Geneva on the Swiss-French border, is the world's largest research center for particle physics. The particle accelerators operated at the research site investigate the structure of matter and the fundamental interactions between the elementary particles. In recognition of this extraordinary research facility, the motif of the special stamp also addresses the latest discovery at CERN: the observation of a new elementary particle announced in July 2012 - the long-sought Higgs boson. This experimental proof of the "Brout-Englert-Higgs" theory led to the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs. The formula printed on the stamp and finished with phosphor varnish describes the standard model of particle physics, with the lower two lines representing the interactions with the Higgs boson (). In 1957, the first particle accelerator was put into operation at CERN. A major milestone in particle research at CERN was the discovery of the W and Z bosons, for which Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics. Another Nobel Prize for physics went in 1992 to the CERN researcher Georges Charpak for the invention and development of particle detectors. The basis for the World Wide Web was also developed at CERN in the early 1990s in order to facilitate the exchange of research results. Over the 60-year history, a number of particle accelerators have been designed, built and operated. The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was put into operation in 2009. In the 26.7-kilometer-long underground LHC ring tunnel, protons or lead ions can be accelerated in opposite directions almost to the speed of light and collided. Four detectors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) measure the properties of the resulting particles. The background image of the stamp shows a graphical representation of the signals that the CMS detector measured when two lead ions collided in December 2010. The prerequisite for these experiments was the development of new cutting-edge technologies and powerful computer systems to analyze the large volumes of data from the collisions. Austrian researchers and technicians have made significant contributions to these technologies, to the development and construction of particle detectors and to the analysis of experimental data.