CERN’s Technology department has just signed a collaboration agreement with the MINES ParisTech engineering school (École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris) and ARMINES, the organisation that manages the school’s research partnerships. The École des Mines and ARMINES are very active in the field of applied research in collaboration with industry, covering fields of expertise as diverse as energy, materials science and applied mathematics. This multidisciplinary approach and common research interests have led to the establishment of a framework collaboration agreement with CERN. For several years, CERN’s Technology department has been stepping up its cooperation with national laboratories and institutes.

“A professional experience at CERN, on one’s CV, gives instant credibility!” This affirmation was made by several of the guest speakers at the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb Career Networking Event that took place on Tuesday, 29 November 2016 in the Main Auditorium.

The event, which was being held for the fourth successive year, was mostly targeted at current postdocs and graduate students at CERN, enabling them to meet alumni of the LHC experiments as well as providing an insight into career opportunities outside of academia.

Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General launched the event, highlighting its importance in providing the collaborations’ current students with real-life testimonials from colleagues who have made the transition from academia to various other domains, including consultancy, patent law and IT. She outlined her endeavour to launch a CERN Alumni Programme in 2017. The CERN Alumni Project Leader, Laure Esteveny, gave a brief description of what alumni should expect from this programme, dubbed the “High-Energy Network”, and the attendees were further invited to register their interest in joining by signing up at http://alumni.cern/.

A captive audience, comprised of more than 250 participants, was drawn into a series of diverse and illuminating presentations (see the Indico page of the event), where former members of the LHC collaborations elaborated on their post-CERN professional experiences in a varied range of fields the challenges they had met and advice on how to overcome them. The speakers were joined by additional LHC collaboration alumni for lively panel discussions at two points during the event. Audience members given the opportunity to ask questions not only following the presentations and during the panel discussions, but also during the networking breaks.

Participants commented that the broad range of speakers and the experiences they reported served to demystify the path towards a possible leap from academia, whilst the vast majority of speakers added that they felt they would have greatly benefited from participating in such an event during their time at CERN. Thanks to the positive feedback from the participants, the organisational team is pleased to announce its return in 2017. We look forward to seeing you then!

PACMAN (Particle Accelerator Components’ Metrology and Alignment at the Nanometre scale) is a Marie Curie Project comprising of ten fellows working towards the development of new alignment techniques for CLIC modules and other future accelerators. Beyond this technical goal, PACMAN is also committed to awakening the interest of young students (young women, in particular) in science careers. In particular, technical school students in Switzerland are a key audience for CERN research and outreach, and these schools represent an ideal partner for the development of research synergies on precision micro-mechanics and controlling systems.

On 10 November 2016, 76 students and professors from the industrial technology and micro-engineering courses of the Haute École Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, HES-SO) came to CERN for an intense day of presentations and site visits. They attended several talks, including presentations given by: Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director for the Accelerators and Technology, on the present and future challenges for CERN; a presentation by the Human Resources Recruitment team on the employment possibility at CERN; and four talks given by the PACMAN management members and students on their Marie Curie Project.

HES-SO University professors also contributed, with four presentations showcasing practical applications of HES research activities across a variety of domains including augmented reality technologies, clean water monitoring and the ‘Clean City’ environmental project.

In the afternoon, the event participants visited several CERN’s sites including the Synchrocyclotron, the Large Magnet Facility, the Magnetic Measurement Laboratory and the CLIC exhibition. 

The event was organized by the PACMAN Marie Curie Project and sponsored by one of the official Partners of the PACMAN project network, the company METROLAB Technology SA. 

On Monday 5 December 2016, recently-recruited staff members and fellows participated in a session in the framework of the Induction Programme. (Image: Sophia Bennett/CERN)

Securing your laptop, PC and data is difficult? Not necessarily! You might have not noticed, but the IT department put under the Christmas tree a wide range of tools which likely improve the security of your data, laptop and PC. Let us present here a few. It's for your protection.

1. Antivirus software. The CERN-chosen antivirus software comes for free installation on your office computer/laptop as well as on your personal Windows or Mac devices like those at home. Just get it installed. If you prefer “more” central assistance, join CERN’s Windows management framework (CMF) - or the Mac Self-Service. Centrally managed Windows PCs come with centrally managed antivirus software by default.
2. Full disk encryption. CERN provides centrally managed encryption solutions for Windows PCs (Bitlocker) as well as Macs (Filevault) and Linux CentOS (LUKS). Advantage of those solutions is that they are completely transparent and you don’t need to hassle with back-up or recovery key storage. Just contact the ServiceDesk to get your hard disk encrypted!
3. PC hardening. The Computer Security Team and the Windows Desktop support team are currently working on guidelines on how to harden PCs to a maximum (while keeping them still usable). A draft of such guidelines can be found here. But beware, this is for the paranoid or for very dedicated usecases!
4. Secure file exchange. Instead of handing out confidential files to Dropbox and alike, CERN is hosting “CERNbox”, a file synchronization service for Android and iOS smart phones, tablets, PCs and laptops. While the data resides well protected within CERN, it is available and sharable through-out the world.

Apart from those four, CERN’s IT department provides you with a wider range of central services so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel: Database-on-demand, Drupal, Java or Sharepoint hosted websites, central storages and back-up solutions (AFS, DFS, CASTOR, and Tivoli, to name a few). Please find a complete list of their offerings here. In addition, a dedicated webpage presents a comparison between commercial/off-site solutions and similar solutions provided in-house by the IT department.

For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report.

On 24 November 2016, 70 participants attended the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Crystal Clear collaboration (experiment RD-18). The speakers guided the audience through the history of the collaboration, and several of the collaboration’s spokespeople gave talks, starting from the first spokesperson in 1991, Paul Lecoq, and ending with Etiennette Auffray, spokesperson since 2010.

In 1991, experiment RD-18, known as the Crystal Clear collaboration, was created and approved by CERN’s Detector Research and Development Committee (DRDC) for the development of new scintillating crystals suitable for the needs of LHC experiments. A multidisciplinary team composed of end users, luminescence experts, crystal growers and commercial producers began working to try to understand the scintillation mechanisms and radiation hardness of new crystals, resulting in significant improvements in the field of scintillation both for the scientific and industrial communities.

Today, this collaboration involves 29 institutes from 17 different countries working on research and development of scintillator materials, the development of new crystal production technology for novel ionising-radiation detectors for high-energy physics, medical imaging and industrial applications. During this symposium, the interesting talks covered all the research and development achievements made by Crystal Clear as well as its connections with industry. Several efforts have been made not only on the development of medical imaging prototypes (such as ClearPET, ClearPEM,etc..) but also in terms of technological developments for other applications.

Established 25 years ago, the Crystal Clear collaboration became a network of excellence, very active and unique in the domain of scintillating materials and their applications, bringing together experts from many disciplines in academia and from the private sector and ready for the challenges of the next generation of detectors.

For more information, read the Courier article

Former CERN Director General Rolf Heuer has been appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour), one of the highest recognitions of achievement in France. Heuer, who is currently president of the German Physical Society (DPG) and president-elect of the SESAME Council, among other roles, was presented with the medal on 22 November 2016 at the residence of the French Permanent Representative in Geneva.

Rolf Heuer has received numerous scientific awards and has been honored by several regions and countries of Europe. In May 2015 he was awarded one of the highest German honors; he was awarded Grand Cross 1st class of the National Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. On 13 December, the head of the government of Lower Austria presented him with the golden medal of the Order of Merit (Goldenes Komturkreuz des Ehrenzeichens für Verdienste).

CERN’s audiovisual archives, which consist of magnetic tapes and films, will be the subject of a special digitisation campaign in 2017. As time passes, these precious records of the Organization’s history are under threat of disappearing. The Memoriav foundation, which is responsible for the preservation of Switzerland’s audiovisual heritage, has agreed to finance a second life for these images of our heritage.

Since the 1960s, CERN’s audiovisual operators and experts have regularly produced films about the life of the Organization, the construction of the accelerators, results from the experiments, visits by celebrities and recordings of lectures given at CERN. Some of these gems, such as the first conference on the World Wide Web in May 1994 or the construction of the first proton collider, the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), in 1968, are hidden away in invisible collections.

In order to preserve these films for the long term, several thousand magnetic tapes (U-matic, Betacam, VHS, etc.) have been catalogued, ready to be digitised as efficiently as possible. Compressed video formats will also be created so that the films can easily be watched online. The films will enrich the video library already available on the CERN Document Server, as well as on the Swiss portal Memobase, which contains all of the heritage material preserved with Memoriav’s support.

During the cataloguing of CERN’s audiovisual productions, several films have been found “by chance” tucked away at the bottom of forgotten boxes! Original recordings might also be hidden in a cupboard in your office. If so, don’t wait for the colours to fade, for the sound to become inaudible or for “sticky-shed syndrome” or demagnetisation to destroy the content once and for all.

Contact video-digitization@cern.ch without delay to include your videos in the 2017 digitisation campaign!

On 5 December, the 2016 LHC run came to a close, marking the end of the first full year of data-taking at a beam energy of 6.5 TeV. Over the past year, the machine delivered peak proton–proton luminosity well above design levels to ATLAS and CMS, coupled with excellent availability. ALICE and LHCb also enjoyed sustained operation at their requested levelled luminosity values. The impressive final 2016 totals of 40 fb^-1 to ATLAS and CMS, 1.9 fb^-1 to LHCb and 13.4 pb^-1 to ALICE reflect the immense amount of effort that has gone into the preparation of beam in the injectors and the performance of the accelerator systems. They also reflect the established level of understanding and control, to maximise overall performance while safely and relentlessly driving the beams through the complex operational cycle.

This level of control is shown in the flexibility of the LHC during dedicated special physics runs and a diverse and dynamic machine development programme. Special runs in 2016 included a challenging set-up with very large beams at the interaction points of ATLAS and CMS. These were needed for the forward physics experiments, ALFA, TOTEM and AFP, allowing them to successfully probe the very small angle proton–proton elastic scattering regime. However, a real demonstration of the maturity of the LHC came at the end of the year.

The 2016 run ended with four weeks of a very successful proton–lead run. For this run, the experiments had requested a variety of specific operating conditions, at two different collision energies.

A key part of the proton–lead strategy was to operate very efficiently in an initial run at a collision energy of 5.02 TeV, with luminosity levelled at a low value for a special mode of data-taking in ALICE. This allowed the fills to be very long; indeed, in the week from 10 November, the LHC spent 75.8% of the time colliding in “stable beams” at constant luminosity and notched up a new record for its longest fill (almost 38 hours).

After that, the schedule recovered from initial delays. But the pressure on the many teams did not abate, as they pushed on to set up a new configuration for the maximum energy of 8.16 TeV. The fills became much shorter as the lead beam was burned away at high luminosity.

A week later, following a short run for the LHCf experiment, the directions of the beams were reversed in yet another set-up phase.

Thanks to the performance of the injectors and a number of improvements in the LHC, the luminosity was pushed up to 7.8 times the design value set a few years ago. It could have gone even further had the intense flux of lead beam fragments from the collisions not risked quenching nearby magnets.

On the last day of the run, the LHC returned to the initial configuration and topped off the data taking at 5.02 TeV.

By the end of the 2016 proton–lead run, every one of the high-priority goals (plus some subsidiary ones) for ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb had been comfortably exceeded. For example, ATLAS and CMS received about 190 nb^-1 of integrated luminosity at 8.16 TeV, almost twice the goal. A proud end to an exceptional year of LHC performance.

On 8 December, CERN and its two Host States signed a tripartite agreement concerning mutual assistance between their respective emergency services for rescue operations on the CERN site. In plain language, this agreement sets out an improved definition of the framework for operations by the emergency services of CERN, Switzerland and France in the event of emergencies on the CERN site and in the surrounding area.

Operations by the emergency services of the two Host States were previously governed by two documents signed by CERN, one with the local authorities in Geneva and one with the Ain département. However, in order to establish a more appropriate legal framework and to ensure more efficient coordination, a tripartite agreement replacing the local arrangements appeared to be a more appropriate solution.

“This agreement is important because it gives us a solid base from which to develop cooperation between our emergency services,” says Simon Baird, head of the HSE Unit. “We will develop joint procedures and training exercises, and CERN’s Fire and Rescue Service will be able to benefit from the experience of the services in France and Switzerland.”

In the spirit of this reinforced cooperation, CERN and its two Host States have started to work together on major accident scenarios, for example.

This is the third tripartite agreement that CERN has signed with its two Host States, following the conclusion of an agreement on protection against ionising radiation and another on the law applicable to contractors working on the CERN site. “The signing of these agreements demonstrates the excellent collaboration between CERN and its Host States,” concludes Friedemann Eder, Head of the Relations with the Host States Service. 

Read the Press Release from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs here.

(*) Elisabeth Laurin, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations in Geneva and to international organizations in Switzerland, Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director general, and Roberto Balzaretti, Director, Directorate of Public International Law, Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

The CERN Procurement and Industrial Services group received the EIPM (European Institute of Purchasing Management) Peter Kraljic award for excellence in the “Innovation and Process” category at a ceremony held on 8 December 2016.

The EIPM Peter Kraljic awards, created in 2010, honour purchasing services that deliver excellence in terms of creativity, innovation and social and environmental responsibility.

The awards jury, which comprises industry leaders and purchasing experts, recognised CERN’s solid procurement process, the innovative mechanisms it uses to communicate with industry, its ability to foster innovation and its programme of education for stakeholders.

CERN is one of thirty companies and organisations from around the world to have been recognised for their outstanding practices by the EIPM since 2010.

In a paper published yesterday, 19 December 2016, in the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration reported the first ever measurement on the optical spectrum of an antimatter atom. This incredible achievement features technological developments that open up a completely new era in high-precision antimatter research. It is the result of over 20 years of work by the CERN antimatter community. Read more about the amazing discovery here. 

The 18 staff members having reached 25 years of service at CERN in 2016 were invited by the Director-General to a reception in their honour on 8 November 2016. We thank them for their continued commitment and wish them all the best!

Only a fraction of the 30,000 accelerators around the world are used for scientific research. Accelerators have diverse uses in varying fields and perhaps one of the most unexpected is their role in cultural preservation.

At first glance, it might seem incongruous to find such a machine in the Louvre, the prestigious Parisian museum. Yet, situated 15m under the glass pyramid at the Louvre is an accelerator called AGLAE, for “Accélérateur Grand Louvre d’Analyse Elémentaire”. AGLAE ascertains the amounts and combinations of elements in the museum’s artefacts.

Scientists use the accelerator to unlock the many secrets of ancient objects and verify their authenticity. The AGLAE can not only help researchers to identify what an artefact is made of but also when and where it was created. It has been used to date traces of paint and to study glasses, metals and ceramics allowing identification of their precise chemical makeup and to even establish where the component minerals were mined.

An upgrade is now in progress which aims to produce a lower-power beam that, coupled with more sensitive detectors, could solve the slight risk of damage when studying paintings with the AGLAE. The upgraded setup (NEW AGLAE) could also allow the accelerator to be more automated and to operate 24 hours a day.

How do scientists study art and archeological artefacts? How does AGLAE collect complex information for cultural preservation? What prestigious cultural heritage object have already been studied with the accelerator under the Louvre?

Find out more at the next CERN Knowledge Transfer seminar where Claire Pacheco, Leader of the AGLAE facility at the Centre of research and restoration of French museums, will speak on
The accelerator under the Louvre (the new AGLAE)
Tuesday 10 January 2017, 10.30 a.m.
Council Chamber
You are invited to join the speaker and organisers for coffee at 10:00
The seminar will be webcast live.

“Stefan, stop being paranoid. There is nothing severe happening with regards to CERN and cyber-security. Let us do our job and stop putting hurdles in the way…”. I felt pity when I heard that message as daily business teaches me and my team differently…

The plain truth is: CERN is under attack. Permanently. Even right now. Web servers. Mail systems. Interactive gateways. Databases. File stores. Office PCs & laptops. Passwords & accounts. In parallel, CERN runs a vast and heterogeneous diversity of computing services. Several computer centres. Dozens of control systems. Hundreds of developers. Thousands of users. Millions of web pages. Tens of millions of lines of code. Many of those assets are attackable. Some of them are vulnerable, weakly protected or lack any inherent security posture. This is naturally human. And this is normal for any digital system. But it also makes CERN as a whole vulnerable to aforementioned attacks. And it is only a question of time that such an attack turns out to be successful. Actually, some attacks have been successful in the past. As in any other enterprise running vast IT systems. And if we extrapolate from the past, there is no reason to believe that we are now safe for all future…

So maybe we just lack some kind of transparency. Transparency, in particular in security matters, is very important in order not to give the impression that we just create “FUD” (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to justify our roles, provide your with snake-oil as mitigative means, and monitor everything and all as we love playing policemen. On the contrary, transparency is important to create trust in our work, give you oversight of our doings, let you judge the reasonability of our decisions and provide means to question our strategies. For us, transparency towards our users, clients, and community is essential.

The regular CERN Bulletin articles are one example expressing what keeps us currently awake at night. But if you really want to learn what goes on on a daily basis, we also issue monthly computer security reports which list every computer security incident & issue, important vulnerabilities & weaknesses found as well as mishaps & problems encountered. These are fairly complete and fully reflect the current security problems related with CERN, CERN’s computing services, and CERN’s community. Recently, we delivered the 125th Bulletin article and soon we will produce our 100th Monthly Report! Therefore, if you want to learn more about computer security incidents & issues at CERN, feel free to follow our report and you will understand why I felt pity with the initial quote.

With that, we wish you a very secure 2017!

For further information, questions or help, check our web site or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

The AIS, Procurement and Accounting teams are launching a new version of the internal purchase request (DAI) form. The new form, which will be available from the middle of January, will be easier to complete as certain fields will be filled in automatically (transport, purchase codes and currency) when a contract is selected, while also ensuring that the information provided is more precise than before. On the whole, the content and interface of the new form are very similar to the current version. However, some fields have been removed (tax, country of distribution, etc.), new ones have been added (conditions of transport, packaging, etc.) and others have been made compulsory (delivery date or deadline).

The activity codes have also been revamped and renamed “purchase codes”. These new codes are the result of extensive work to bring them up to date, involving more than 70 technical experts. They are now better able to target suppliers who can meet CERN’s needs and it will be easier to see the expenditure under each code. A list of the new codes can be found in PDF and Excel format on this page. 

The help field on the DAI form (“?”) and the online course Procurement of supplies at CERN up to 200 000 CHF have also been updated to provide more information about the new form and use of the purchase codes.

On 19 December 2016 a ceremony at CERN marked the tenth donation of computing equipment to an academic institution, the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Ecuador.

On this occasion, 72 servers, two racks and two network switches were donated to the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador.  The donation included more than a thousand processor cores and eight disk servers providing about 400 terabytes of storage. Thanks to this equipment, the Escuela Politécnica Nacional will set-up a data centre which will become part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and will support the research projects of the two Ecuadorian universities who are currently contributing to the CMS experiment.  

Since 2012, CERN has regularly donated computing equipment that no longer meets its highly specific requirements on efficiency but is still more than adequate for less exacting environments. To date, a total of 1605 servers and 105 network switches have been donated to ten countries, namely Bulgaria, Egypt, Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia and now Ecuador.

*CERN’s Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen (right) and Minister Arturo Cabrera (left), Deputy Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Geneva, represented the Escuela Politécnica Nacional - EPN and the Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación - SENESCYT.

In the recently built extension of the North Experimental Area (EHN1) technicians are constructing two 8x8x8-metre cubes with thick, red, steel walls, resembling castle turrets.

They are intended to host the single- and double-phase ProtoDUNE modules. These are engineering prototype detectors for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

DUNE is a major international project, part of the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), estimated to begin operation by 2026 at Fermilab in the US. DUNE will be made up of four giant neutrino detectors – each one measuring 66x19x18 metres – in the form of liquid argon time projection chambers (LAr-TPC), in both single and dual phase. The ProtoDUNE prototype detectors are therefore a key intermediate step to enable the LAr technology to be scaled up to the level of these next-generation neutrino detectors.

All these activities are part of the CERN Neutrino Platform programme (CENF) – to find out more, see this Courier article and visit the CENF website. You can also read more about neutrinos in this recent Symmetry article.

On Friday 6 January, the percussion group STOMP took time out from their worldwide tour to visit CERN. After seeing the Synchrocyclotron, Antiproton Decelerator and S’Cool Lab, it was time to bring out the drumsticks.

In the Microcosm garden – home to items from CERN’s history including the Gargamelle bubble chamber and a LEPRF cavity– the cast sprang into action. With sticks whirring and hips shaking, they brought life and fantastic sound to the normally silent, sombre artefacts.

The performance built to a crescendo at the LHCdipole magnet next to the Globe of Science and Innovation. There, the whole group leapt towards the magnet giving voice to the mighty blue tube in deep, resonating, powerful beats.

The LHC never sounded so good. See the results for yourself in the video above.

Disclaimer: No CERN objects were damaged in the making of this film. CERN does not normally encourage visitors to hit its historic objects and these trained percussionists were fully briefed beforehand to avoid fragile components.