For detecting the direction and momenta of charged particles with extreme accuracy, the ALEPH detector had at its core a time projection chamber, for years the world's largest. In the foreground from the left, Jacques Lefrancois, Jack Steinberger, Lorenzo Foa and Pierre Lazeyras. ALEPH was an experiment on the LEP accelerator, which studied high-energy collisions between electrons and positrons from 1989 to 2000.