Up to 1TByte per second data shall be transmitted in the biggest physics experiment of the world, which is achieved with the optical fibres of tde.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. It sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near
Geneva.

CERN is a laboratory where scientists unite to study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible.

Founded in 1954, the laboratory was one of Europe's first joint ventures and includes now 20 Member States. To achieve the best results, Cern is
installing one of the bigest lokal fiber optic networks. This redundant built-on network has an overall length of 1500 km. It runs through a tunnel and interconnects the eight research centres, that go along the ring-system with a length of 27km, with the overground stations. The fiber optic cabling plays a decisive role in this context, because the real time transfer of the measured data and the synchronisation of the particle acceleration is transacted via this cabling. The synchronisation is is only allowed to vary just a very few parts in a billon. Therefore the fiber optic cabling has to have excellent damping characteristics and to conform to very close lengths tolerances, to avoid runtime problems.

tde appears here as the supplier of the contractor Draka. Nearly the complete fiber optic connection technology is supplied by tde. In doing so, the whole spectrum of connectors throughout the market, inchoate with E2000, over MPO to the Expanded beam technology, is to be applied. Especially for this project, tde has tooled the MPO-technology in singlemode and multimode in its own production and has developed a special type of cable, adequate for this connector.