On June 30th the Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator, HERA, was shut down. The 6.3 km HERA ring which provided electrons and protons for use in particle and nuclear physics experiments, was shut down to make way for new scientific facilities at the DESY Laboratory near Hamburg in Germany. HERA offered the possibility to study, at very high energies, scattering between electrons of 30 GeV and protons of 820 GeV.
Not only has HERA provided new insight into the structure of the proton and made possible new measurements of the electroweak force, it has also laid the foundations for the next generation of particle physics experiments at CERNs Large Hadron Collider which start next year - Professor Tim Greenshaw of the University of Liverpool.
Yesterday evening I ran into a couple that had met as student and postdoc at HERMES and I learned that they now are married. HERMES has played a large role not only in our professional lives, but for many of us it has been a big part of our lives, period - Professor Ralf Kaiser of the University of Glasgow