LIP-ECO | 14 Abril, 2025

"We celebrate World Quantum Day with the launch of the 40-year logo of Portugal's membership in CERN."

Today, LIP celebrates World Quantum Day by launching a logo to mark the 40th anniversary of Portugal’s membership in CERN, a milestone that began with an initiative by Professor José Mariano Gago and was formalized in April 1985. 

With this milestone, and remembering that the sciences and technologies we explore at LIP and CERN are fundamentally quantum, we kick off a series of initiatives throughout 2025, also celebrating the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, which will culminate in the celebration of LIP’s 40th anniversary in 2026. 

The particles created in the collisions studied at CERN all behave according to quantum laws, revealing some of nature’s mysteries while raising many unanswered questions in the sub-nuclear quantum world. 

Some of the answers uncovered through the exploration of this quantum world — including the development of instruments, methods, and technologies — have enabled the creation of technologies that were unimaginable at the time of these scientific discoveries, but that have since revolutionized society and the way we live. 

What new discoveries and technologies will arise from the continued exploration of this quantum realm, at increasingly smaller scales, remains an open question. 

In this logo, we seek to reflect the shape and scale of particle accelerators, representing the successive rings of CERN’s accelerators, with line thickness suggesting progressive growth in scale and energy.
The center of the logo symbolizes the collision moment — the starting point for the creation of new particles and for the study of matter.
The two opposing points represent particles circulating in opposite directions and colliding, as in LHC experiments.
The mirrored layout of the curves evokes fundamental principles of particle physics, such as conservation, symmetry, and duality — intrinsic and essential properties in quantum mechanics.