Research areas Particle physics Neutrinos Gamma-ray astronomy New acceleration techniques Medical applications Key figures 50 Permanent researchers 15 Postdoctoral students 18 PhD students 250 Average number of publications per year Physics discover LLR website > discover LLR website > Founded in 1936 by Louis Leprince-Ringuet, LLR conducts research on high-energy photon astronomy and particle physics. > Read more > Read more Take a videotour of the lab LLR. Leprince-Ringuet Laboratory A joint research unit CNRS, École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91120 Palaiseau, France. High-energy astronomy explores the violent phenomena of the universe by observing the sky via gamma photons, which are a thousand billion times more energetic than those from visible light. LLR uses the HESS Observatory in Namibia to observe these photons through their interaction with the atmosphere. Questions in the field of particle physics include the origin of thematter-antimatter asymmetry, the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, the nature of neutrino masses and mixings, and quark-gluon plasma. LLR played a key role in the discovery of the Higgs boson in the CMS experiment at CERN, and is strongly involved in the SuperK and T2K experiments in Japan.