CERN (Conseil Européan pour la Recherche Nucléaire) is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research: a particle physics laboratory on the French-Swiss border, west of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1954 and is an intergovermental organization supported by 20 member states. It is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Over the last two decades, the experiments at CERN have provided particle physicists crucial information about the electroweak theory.