page_title: Super Proton Synchrotron
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Super Proton Synchrotron / History
caption_attribution_description: A proton-antiproton interaction at 540 GeV, showing particle tracks in a streamer chamber. The dark bands on each side are lead baffles, designed to generate cascades as particles pass through. Photo taken in 1982 at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron by the UA5 collaboration, of which I was a part.
context_page_description: The Super Proton Synchrotron is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, 6.9 kilometres in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland.
context_section_description: The SPS was designed by a team led by John Adams, director-general of what was then known as Laboratory II. Originally specified as a 300 GeV accelerator, the SPS was actually built to be capable of 400 GeV, an operating energy it achieved on the official commissioning date of 17 June 1976. However, by that time, this energy had been exceeded by Fermilab, which reached an energy of 500 GeV on 14 May of that year.
  The SPS has been used to accelerate protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons (for use as the injector for the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP)), and heavy ions.
  From 1981 to 1991, the SPS operated as a hadron (more precisely, proton–antiproton) collider (as such it was called SppS), when its beams provided the data for the UA1 and UA2 experiments, which resulted in the discovery of the W and Z bosons. These discoveries and a new technique for cooling particles led to a Nobel Prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984.
  From 2006 to 2012, the SPS was used by the CNGS experiment to produce a neutrino stream to be detected at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, 730 km from CERN.
caption: A proton–antiproton collision from the UA5 experiment at the SPS in 1982
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