Today, the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, Russia, celebrates its golden jubilee, 50 years after it was established as a new Soviet particle-physics laboratory, on 15 November 1963. Four years later, the U-70 proton synchrotron – the “Serpukhov accelerator” – was commissioned, reaching a world record energy for protons of 76 GeV on 14 October 1967. Today, IHEP continues both fundamental and applied research at the U-70. In 2011, the machine was upgraded to accelerate carbon nuclei, allowing the first experiments at IHEP in relativistic nuclear physics. 

Read more: See this preview from the December issue of the CERN Courier