The Big Questions, Answered

NIPSCERN (Núcleo de Instrumentação e Processamento de Sinais) is a research and development laboratory at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Brazil. The lab designs electronic instrumentation, signal processing methods and processors for high energy physics, working in direct collaboration with the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Meet the team and mission.

NIPSCERN contributes to the operation and calibration of the TileCal hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS detector, develops digital signal reconstruction methods used in event triggering, and builds software such as CGVWeb, which runs on the main wall of the ATLAS Control Room in Geneva. Members of the lab work both at UFJF and on site at CERN; the full story is on our CERN & ATLAS page.

We are hiring: the lab looks for researchers in logic, philosophy, software engineering, the engineering disciplines, programming and design. Companies and institutions interested in building on our work are welcome: our license is open to partnerships. Write to [email protected] or meet us through the About page.

SAPHO is a scalable hardware architecture and toolchain for creating processors: you describe an algorithm in a few lines of C±, and SAPHO generates a soft-core processor tailored to run exactly that algorithm on an FPGA. The platform is the sum of its parts (SAPHO = AURORA + YANC) and includes POLARIS, YAWT and PRISM.

AURORA is the official desktop IDE of the SAPHO platform: write the algorithm, compile, simulate and inspect the generated processor in a single window. Aurora Intelligence adds an AI assistant that operates the IDE through its own tools.

YANC is the compiler toolchain powering the SAPHO ecosystem, including cmmcomp (the C± compiler) and asmcomp (the assembly compiler). It is written in C with Flex, Bison and GCC.

CGVWeb renders real collision events from the ATLAS calorimeters in 3D, in any browser, with no installation. Built on Rust/WebAssembly and Three.js, it runs on the main wall of the ATLAS Control Room at CERN. Open the live application or read the technical documentation.

POLARIS is a modern, cross-platform graphical IDE for the SAPHO ecosystem, built with Tauri and Rust. It integrates the Monaco editor, the PRISM RTL viewer and the YAWT wave tracer.

CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. The name comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, the provisional council created in 1952 to plan the laboratory; the organisation it founded kept the acronym. Our CERN & ATLAS page tells the story in depth.

CERN sits on the border between Switzerland and France, just outside Geneva, with its main campus in Meyrin. Its accelerators run underground across both countries, including the ring where the team works with the ATLAS experiment.

CERN was founded on 29 September 1954 by twelve European countries rebuilding scientific cooperation after the war. Today it counts more than twenty member states, and scientists from every continent, including Brazil, take part in its experiments.

ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider: 46 metres long, 25 metres tall, about 7,000 tonnes, sitting 100 metres underground. In 2012, ATLAS and CMS announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. NIPSCERN contributes to its TileCal calorimeter; see how.

The Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometre ring about 100 metres under the Franco-Swiss border. Superconducting magnets steer two beams of protons travelling near the speed of light into head-on collisions, up to 40 million times per second, recreating conditions close to those of the early universe. Detectors like ATLAS record what comes out.

The ATLAS collaboration gathers thousands of scientists from roughly 180 institutions in around 40 countries. Brazil is among them, and UFJF, through NIPSCERN, is one of the participating institutions. Our contributions are detailed on the CERN & ATLAS page.

No. The LHC collides protons, something cosmic rays do in Earth's atmosphere constantly and at even higher energies, and no portal, dimension or singularity is involved. What the collisions actually produce is far more interesting: precise measurements of the particles and forces that make up our universe. See what really happens inside ATLAS.

The Standard Model describes matter with 17 fundamental particles: six quarks, six leptons (including the electron and the neutrinos), four force-carrying bosons (photon, gluon, W and Z) and the Higgs boson, confirmed at CERN in 2012. There is a full diagram on our CERN & ATLAS page.

The CERN Courier is the international journal of high energy physics, published since 1959. NIPSCERN curates a digital collection of editions from 2013 to today, alongside our own scientific publications.