HERMES experiment

HERMES was a particle detector at the HERA particle accelerator located at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg. The experiment's goal was to investigate the quark–gluon structure of matter by examining how a nucleon's constituents affect its spin. It later developed into a pioneering experiment for measuring generalised parton parton distributions and a general-purpose experiment for the study of QCD processes. HERMES completed its first run between 1995 and 2000, and its second run between 2001 and 2007. It measured 3.5 m × 8 m × 5 m and weighed 400 tons.

The HERMES collaboration consisted of nearly 200 scientists from more than 13 countries.