LEP: a new stage in corpuscular physics

The Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) is to be built on the France-Switzerland border near to Geneva and to be in service towards 1987. The electron and positron packets will be pre-accelerated in the existing CERN machines and then accelerated in less than a tenth of a millisecond around the 27 kilometres of the LEP. The electron-positron collisions will be observed by detectors placed at eight points around the ring. Electron-positron annihilation and the creation of new particles will be studied leading to the derivation of new models for particle interaction and the unification of the different types of interactions.