[2] The SPS was designed by a team led by John Adams, director-general of what was then known as Laboratory II.

[3] The SPS has been used to accelerate protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons (for use as the injector for the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP)[4]), and heavy ions.

From 1981 to 1991, the SPS operated as a hadron (more precisely, proton–antiproton) collider (as such it was called SppS), when its beams provided the data for the UA1 and UA2 experiments, which resulted in the discovery of the W and Z bosons.

These discoveries and a new technique for cooling particles led to a Nobel Prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984.

From 2006 to 2012, the SPS was used by the CNGS experiment to produce a neutrino beam to be detected at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, 730 km from CERN.