1989: giant LEP takes its first step

With its 27 km circumference, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider was – and still is - the largest electron-positron accelerator ever built. The excavation of the LEP tunnel was Europe's largest civil-engineering project prior to the Channel Tunnel. Three tunnel-boring machines started excavating the tunnel in February 1985 and the ring was completed three years later.

LEP consisted of 5176 magnets and 128 accelerating cavities. CERN’s accelerator complex provided the particles and four enormous detectors, ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL, observed the collisions.

LEP was commissioned in July 1989. For seven years, it operated at 100 GeV, producing 17 million Z particles, uncharged carriers of the weak force. It was then upgraded for a second operation phase, with as many as 288 superconducting accelerating cavities added to double the energy and produce W⁺ and W^- particles, also carriers of the weak force. 

During 11 years of research, LEP and its experiments provided a detailed study of the electroweak interaction based on solid experimental foundations. Measurements performed at LEP also proved that there are three – and only three – generations of particles of matter. LEP was closed down on 2 November 2000 to make way for the construction of the LHC in the same tunnel.