Here is a collection of photographs of Flat Stanley, taken during his recent trip to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and to the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. Stanley was accompanied at all times by Uncle Steve and Aunt Valérie except, of course, during his visit to the future to see their new house on the Jura.

Stanley Visits CERN

Stanley arrives at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is just to Stanley's right, next to his right foot. The large ring outlines the tunnel of the future LHC collider.
Stanley visits the LEP (Large Electron-Positron) collider, which is currently be dismantled to make way for the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider).	Stanley travels to the future to visit the LHC in 2005. Rather than colliding electrons and positrons, as did LEP, the LHC will collide protons together to explore physics at much higher energies.

Stanley Visits the ATLAS Detector

While Stanley is in the future, he visits the ATLAS Experiment, currently being constructed for the LHC to detect the particles produced in the high-energy collisions.	Stanley and ATLAS from the end. Note how small Stanley appears (or how large the detector appears).
After disassembling the full ATLAS Detector, Stanley poses next to the Muon Spectrometer. This is the largest part of the detector, used to measure muons, particles which traverse the inner parts of the detector. They leave tracks in the spectrometer.	Here, Stanley finds some muon tracks, produced during a collision. They leave traces or "digits" in the detector, which are input and reconstructed by software in computers located outside of the detector. Over 100 Megabytes of data will be processed every second when the detector is running, producing 1 petabyte (about 100,000 PC hard disks) of data every year.
At the LEP beam pipe, Stanley gets caught in the middle of a collision between electrons and positrons.	Here is a rare physics event. An electron and a positron combine to produce Stanley, who then decays to two charged weak bosons called W's. W's were first discovered at CERN in 1983 and were measured very precisely by the LEP experiments.

Stanley Visits the Jura

Stanley takes a walk with Aunt Valérie, Cousin Ella and Zabou on the Jura mountains in the winter. The Jura are an old range of mountains northwest of the Alps. Fossils found in the region date to an era known as the "Jurassic Period."	Here, Stanley plays in the snow on the Jura with Cousin Ella.
Before returning to Jackson, Stanley takes one more trip to the future. This time he visits the future house of Aunt Valérie, Uncle Steve and Cousin Ella on the foothills of the Jura in a village called Thoiry.