The CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR)

The CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) was the first facility ever built providing colliding hadron beams. It mainly operated with protons with beam energies of 15 to 31 GeV. The ISR was conceived in the years 1960 to 1964 and was approved in 1965. It came into operation at the beginning of 1971 and was decommissioned as a collider in 1983. A number of accelerator technologies have been either much improved or developed at the ISR which subsequently have become enabling technologies for a number of hadron storage rings and large colliders. Prominent examples of such technologies are ultra-high vacuum technology, beam diagnostics based on Schottky signals and stochastic cooling. The experiences obtained with the ISR were later exploited at the proton-antiproton facility in the CERN SPS, the Tevatron at Fermilab, the RHIC at Brookhaven and, finally, by the LHC at CERN.