FameLab is the exciting competition for young researchers that is conquering the world of science communication. FameLab is not just another talent show for scientists: its magic formula truly helps real scientists show off their communication skills. Successful candidates will have to impress the judges by giving an original and entertaining 3-minute talk. The contestants are judged on the content, clarity and charisma of their talks. The result is an amazing collection of speeches that are inspiring, educational and accurate, despite their brevity.

CERN, which was already a partner in the Swiss and French competitions, is now launching its own event. In order to offer further opportunities for you to become a star of science communication, CERN is organising the first Physics FameLab, to be held on 21 May at CERN. It is open to young researchers (up to 35 years of age) with a valid CERN account. The winner of the competition will go on to participate in the international final that will be held during the 2015 Cheltenham Science Festival.

Enter the competition now! Read the rules, record a video (3 minutes long maximum!) of your talk and send its URL to the organisers before 5 April 2015. The best videos will be selected to participate in the CERN event. Visit the website for more detailed information.

After a shutdown lasting two years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, is ready once again for the arrival of particle beams. The teams are completing the final tests after having solved on 31 March the problem that had been delaying the restart of the accelerator. The first beams could be circulating in the machine sometime between Saturday and Monday.

“We are confident of being able to restart the machine over the weekend, as all of the tests performed so far have been successful,” said Frédérick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology at CERN.

When the LHC and the whole accelerator chain are running, operators work in shifts around the clock in the control room. They will attempt to circulate beams in the LHC in both directions, at their injection energy of 450 GeV, as soon as all the lights are green.

Particle collisions at an energy of 13 TeV could start as early as June.

It was a busy Easter Sunday for the LHC operators.

After two years of maintenance and months of preparation for restart, the world's most powerful particle accelerator is back in operation. At 10.41am on Sunday, a proton beam (Beam 2 – circulating anticlockwise) was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12.27pm by a Beam 1 rotating in the opposite direction. These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing the energy of the beams.

“Operating accelerators for the benefit of the physics community is what CERN’s here for,” said Director-General Rolf Heuer. “Today, CERN’s heart beats once more to the rhythm of the LHC.” 

There were cheers from the LHC hub as the beams made around the accelerator sector by sector, and champagne was popping the LHCb and CMS control rooms as they received their first splash events. Shift engineer Laurette Ponce was presented with a giant chocolate Easter egg for her team's efforts.

Members of the CERN Communications group live-blogged the day's events – you can catch up with a blow-by-blow account of the restart here.

“The return of beams to the LHC rewards a lot of intense, hard work from many teams of people," said Paul Collier of the Beams department. “It’s very satisfying for our operators to be back in the driver’s seat, with what’s effectively a new accelerator to bring on-stream, carefully, step by step.”

“After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape," said Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “But the most important step is still to come when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels.”

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer visited the SESAME laboratory in Jordan on Monday 13 April along with European Commissioner for research, Carlos Moedas. CERN and the European Union are working together to provide magnets for the main ring of what will be the Middle East’s first major international science centre. When it begins operation in 2016, SESAME, a synchrotron light source, will be the first laboratory of its kind in the region, carrying out experiments ranging from life sciences to environmental science and archaeology.

The SESAME visit followed a half-day conference on science diplomacy in the Jordanian capital Amman, and concluded with the symbolic presentation by Professor Heuer and Mr Moedas of a model SESAME magnet to SESAME Director, Professor Khaled Toukan. The model will remain at SESAME until the real thing, currently under test at CERN, can replace it, at which point the model will return to CERN as a reminder of the organization’s contribution to this important regional project.

SESAME’s members are currently Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey. Observers at the SESAME Council are Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Mr Moedas took the opportunity of his visit to the laboratory to sign the letter that will formally ratify the acceptance of the European Union as a new Observer.

Through capacity building programmes in collaboration with established light source laboratories, the potential user community in SESAME’s members has steadily grown to over 300 people today, all eagerly awaiting first light in 2016. In the words of SESAME’s President of Council, Chris Llewellyn-Smith, a former CERN Director General, “SESAME is being driven from the ground up by people ready to reach across borders in order to carry out excellent science.”

CERN’s contribution to SESAME under project leader Jean-Pierre Koutchouk, comes in the form of the EU-funded CESSAMag project, through which CERN is coordinating the production of dipole, quadrupole and sextupole magnets for the SESAME main ring, along with the associated power supplies. These are being produced in SESAME members Cyprus, Israel and Turkey as well as in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, with in-kind support from SESAME members Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. A first complete sector is currently under test at CERN, and scheduled to be delivered to SESAME later in the year. Commissioning is due to begin in the second half of 2016.

When CMS physicist Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez created Lonely Chairs at CERN back in April 2014, she was not expecting the immediate reaction it garnered. Within days, the blog had picked up thousands of followers and was featured in Gizmodo and The Guardian. "The response inside CERN was very positive, but the response outside was overwhelming," says Rebeca. "I’ve got a lot of followers who are really into science and are very excited about CERN. They comment about wanting to work here - sometimes on the ugliest chair I’ve posted."

The blog showcases an older, perhaps grittier side of the Laboratory - one that is very familiar to people at CERN but that can be somewhat surprising to the rest of the world. "I like CERN the way it is and sometimes it’s difficult to show what it looks like on the inside," says Rebeca. "What makes CERN so unique, and what I like most, is that it’s been here for 60 years and you can tell. That’s a good thing. It helps put you and your work into context. People were working here before you, and they were doing the same things that you are doing - maybe even using the same chair.” 

"Everyone likes to have new things," she continues. "All the new buildings and new elevators are great... but the spirit of CERN is also to be found in the old stuff. New things can be practical and pretty, but they are lacking in history. I like best the character you find in old things."

As Lonely Chairs at CERN nears 20,000 followers, Rebeca has no plans to slow down: "I am wondering when people will get tired of chairs, or when I will simply run out of them. But so far I still have lots to go." As for her own chair? Rebeca assures us that it’s just as bleak: "My chair is really, really old - I have no idea how many physicists have sat on it but... a lot."

In 1983, when CERN discovered the W and Z bosons, the announcement to the world came 5 days after the internal seminar. In contrast, in 2012 CERN’s live tweeting of the Higgs discovery reached news desks before the press release. The speed at which breaking news reaches people is unprecedented due to social media.

We are now in the final preparations for the start of run 2, with LHC experiments poised to take data at the higher energy levels of 13 TeV. With excitement building, so too is the urge to be the first to send out breaking news online. Why then are researchers being encouraged to coordinate their communications with CERN?

There are three aspects to the answer. The first lies with the readers of the messages. They want to understand what is going on and share in the excitement. Real-time messages need to avoid conflicting or confusing information, hence the benefit of coordination and clarity. The second lies in the general practises we are familiar with, certain journals request that the scientists respect embargoes to not communicate about their research until the journal has officially published; CERN too requests a similar courtesy. The third lies in the CERN social media guidelines. Taking time to fact-check information that remains permanently online is invaluable, clarifying whether information is official and is clear not only affects your online reputation but also that of the organization.

We are all part of this scientific endeavour, we work hard and we share the excitement. We do this by all working together and respecting the CERN code of conduct, which underpins the CERN social media guidelines.

Find out more about CERN social media.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started delivering physics data today for the first time in 27 months. After an almost two year shutdown and several months re-commissioning, the LHC is now providing collisions to all of its experiments at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, almost double the collision energy of its first run. This marks the start of season 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new discoveries. The LHC will now run round the clock for the next three years.

“With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning,” said CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry. “It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all of the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen.”

Today at 10.40am, the LHC operators declared “stable beams”, the signal for the LHC experiments that they can start taking data. Beams are made of “trains” of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC. These so-called bunch trains circulate in opposite directions, guided by powerful superconducting magnets. Today the LHC was filled with 6 bunches each containing around 100 billion protons. This rate will be progressively increased as the run goes on to 2808 bunches per beam, allowing the LHC to produce up to 1 billion collisions per second.

For more information see the live blog that covered events as they unfolded.

See a gallery of images from the day.

For the first time, a CERN competitor has reached the final of the famous science communication competition Famelab. Lillian Smestad, who works on CERN’s AEGIS experiment, will be one of the nine scientists selected among hundreds in 20 countries worldwide.

Follow the final here.

FameLab is a science-communication competition sponsored by the British Council and has been running for 10 years. Participating scientists have to engage the audience in a three-minute presentation on a scientific topic. This year, for the first time, CERN has entered the contest as a separate entity; the first organisation – rather than nation – to compete.

Smestad passed this selection on 8 May at CERN. She then made it through to the final with her captivating talk on the relationship and practical differences between theorists and experimentalists.

The final is due to take place on Thursday 4 June at 9.30pm CEST in the EDF energy arena. Smestad will be the first to present before a panel of judges.

In a meeting at UNESCO in Paris on 26-27 May, the Council for the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) project unanimously decided to invite CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer to succeed Chris Llewellyn Smith as President of the SESAME Council.

Heuer accepted, saying that he was honoured to take on a project of such importance for science and for the region. The Council agreed that the hand-over will take place after the formal opening of SESAME in late 2016 or the first half of 2017.

SESAME is a unique joint venture based in Jordan that brings together scientists from its members Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey. The facility – a synchrotron light source – will provide an intense source of light from infrared to X-ray wavelengths, allowing researchers from the region to investigate the properties of advanced materials, biological processes and cultural artefacts.

CERN’s contribution to SESAME comes in the form of the EU-funded CESSAMag project, through which CERN is coordinating the production of dipole, quadrupole and sextupole magnets for the SESAME main ring, along with the associated power supplies. These are being produced in SESAME members Cyprus, Israel and Turkey as well as in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, with in-kind support from SESAME members Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. Commissioning is due to begin in the second half of 2016.

Llewellyn Smith was also a Director-General of CERN, from 1994-1997. During his mandate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was approved for construction (December 1994) and Japan and the US became Observer States. Luciano Maiani succeeded Llewellyn Smith as CERN Director-General in January 1999.

On 8 June 2015, CERN welcomed 100 primary-school children to present the findings of their "Be a scientist" projects. The aim of the programme is to introduce primary-school children aged 9 to 12 to the experimental procedures of scientific research.

This year, 33 classes in Geneva and neighbouring France participated in the "mystery box" project. The organizers of the "Be a scientist" programme provided the children with sealed boxes that contained various objects. Each class received a different box, and the organizers vary the boxes' contents from year to year. Some of this year’s objects were inspired by the International Year of Light and helped the children to explore this theme. Such objects included seeds grown with light, matches to produce light and many other objects.

The children proposed experiments, formed hypotheses, detailed their methods and drew conclusions to gather clues about what their box might contain. They also received additional hints such as X-rays. Once the boxes were opened, the children continued their research on the contents. For example, having discovered that their box contained seeds, children from Vaulx primary school planted them to see which types germinated best .

Throughout the day the children also participated in physics shows and presentations. The project was a great success and it continues to expand each year.

"Be a scientist" has been running every year since 2010 and is organised by CERN, the “PhysiScope” group and Faculty of Science and Education at the University of Geneva, and the education authorities in the Pays de Gex (Inspection de l’éducation nationale) and Geneva (Département de l’instruction publique).

More information about the project

CERN’s online maps, MAPCERN, now have the added bonus of Google Street View, thanks to the new release of captured images of many CERN sites by Google.

Google Street View, an integrated service of Google Maps introduced in 2007, links 360-degree panoramic photos into a virtual tour. CERN and Google began collaborating on this Street View project in 2010 and now these Street View images have been embedded into MAPCERN, accessible by clicking the “Street View” tab in MAPCERN’s bottom-right-hand window.

If you need to locate a building at CERN, or plan an intervention of equipment, you can save time by using the Street View images to check out the area in advance. The CERN Meyrin site has been fully mapped, as well as the surfaces of the eight LHC points, as well as BA2 and BA3.

As well as this new MAPCERN integration, new Street View images are available directly from Google Maps include the Proton Synchrotron. This complements the 2013 release of images of the ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb underground experimental caverns as well as the LHC tunnel. The control rooms of several experiments, the CERN Computing Centre and the CERN Control Centre on the Prévessin site can also be directly accessed via Google Maps.

“We’re delighted that CERN opened its doors to Google Maps Street View allowing anyone, anywhere in the world to take a peek into its laboratories, control centers and its myriad underground tunnels housing cutting-edge experiments” said Pascale Milite, an operations lead at Google.

CERN and Google hope to include more Google Street Views of CERN sites in the future.

On 24 June 2015 at 9 a.m., Swisscom becomes CERN’s mobile phone operator. As of this date, CERN mobile phone numbers will be 075 411 xxxx and people with a CERN mobile phone subscription must change their SIM card.

From 24 June 2015 at midday, all calls to the old Sunrise numbers (076 487 xxxx) will be deviated to a voicemail announcing the change of number. In order to automatically update CERN contacts in your CERN mailbox to the new GSM numbers 075 411 xxxx, you can use the following link: http://cern.ch/go/hTw6.

Checklist

• Change your SIM card and start using the Swisscom numbers as of 24 June at 9 a.m.
• Inform your external contacts that your mobile number has changed.
• Update your contact numbers on your phone, mailbox….
• Review your procedures and documentation if you are using the old Sunrise numbering 076487xxxx/+4176487xxxx; update this where necessary or switch to using the abbreviated 16xxxx format.
• Review your scripts, tools, applications, etc. that use the e-mail to SMS service.
• Verify your electronic signature.
• Change call forwarding between landlines and mobiles if you have it configured. More information here
• Report any issue with your new mobile to the Telecom Lab, tel. 72480

More information

• Check the IT status board to get the latest information about the migration day:  http://cern.ch/itssb
• Read the CERN Bulletin announcement
• https://cern.ch/gsm-migration

CERN will be back at the Montreux Jazz Festival for its third annual workshop: ‘The Physics of Music and The Music of Physics’ on 9 July at 3 pm in Petit Palais.

Run 2 of the LHC began this spring, bringing with it hopes and promise of new physics and discovery. One of many key items on the LHC shopping list is the existence of new spatial dimensions, a potential means to harmonise gravity in our theoretical understanding of nature.

Robert Kieffer of the CERN Beam Instrumentation Group and Gaëtan Parseihian of the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique, CNRS, Marseille, will animate the Physics of Music half of the workshop with a demonstration of the physics behind acoustics. Their programme includes a lesson on sound sculpture and the addition of spatial dimensions to music, followed by a discussion and demonstration of sound perception. Participants will then be treated to an ambisonic concert composed from various sounds made at CERN.

The Music of Physics half of the workshop will be animated by Juliana Cherston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in the US, Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and the GEANT Association, and Ewan Hill of the University of Victoria in Canada, TRIUMF, and the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. They will present a new project that maps physical parameters of LHC proton collisions to sound parameters, thus creating music from the particle events. 

The grand finale will feature jazz pianist Al Blatter playing a duet with sonified live collisions from the LHC. In his attempt to bring harmony between humankind and nature, Al hopes to bring music to a higher dimension – a feat only possible at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Find out more here  

The CERN Grey Book database has a brand new look.

The database stores data on the Organization’s research programme, including all the experiments and projects, their collaborating institutes and their participants.

Now, 15 years after its last web interface was released, the Grey Book has a new look. There have been changes to search and navigation, as well as structural changes to the database - now data is directly accessed from the CERN’s Foundation database.

“I am really happy with the way you can navigate dynamically and in multiple ways between the views of the different domain items,” says Doris Chromek-Burckhart, who heads the Users’ Office, which maintains the database.

“The new site offers global as well as context-specific search options that make it really easy, for example, to find all the scientific collaborators of an experiment in just one click. In addition, when signed in, all those lists can be exported to excel or as pdf files. It is powerful and elegant!”

CERN has published annually a full list of the experiments and projects that take place at the laboratory since 1975. Until 2000, when the database went online, these lists were printed and bound with a grey cover, hence the name.

Visit the new site at the usual URL: greybook.cern.ch

At the start of the summer, the teams developing the magnets for the future HL-LHC were in high spirits. On 16 June, a 11-Tesla superconducting dipole magnet model manufactured at CERN reached record performance levels, surpassing those of its predecessors. The model was tested in a special cryostat in hall SM18 and its magnetic field intensity exceeded 11 Tesla after just six quenches: a much faster increase in intensity than previous models. In addition, it reached a magnetic field intensity of 12 Tesla (corresponding to a current of 12,800 amps in the coil); higher than any of the previous models. “This is excellent news for the HL-LHC project,” says Frédéric Savary of the Technology department, who is in charge of the tests. “These results demonstrate CERN’s extensive know-how in the manufacture of high-field superconducting magnets.”

The HL-LHC project is an integral part of the Laboratory’s Medium-Term Plan and aims to increase the number of collisions in the LHC by a factor of 5 to 10 in order to reach an integrated luminosity of 250 fb^-1 per year as of 2025. To achieve this goal, 1.2 km of the current accelerator will be replaced with new machinery. One of the changes required to allow operation at this luminosity is an increase in the number of collimators, devices that protect the machine from particles that stray from the beam. But installing more collimators in the ring results in less space for magnets, so the current dipole magnets will be replaced by pairs of shorter but more powerful magnets. In the HL-LHC, two new 5.5-metre-long dipole magnets (i.e. 11 metres in total) will have to bend the beam just as effectively as the present 15-metre-long magnets. As a result, these magnets will have to generate an 11-Tesla magnetic field, compared to the 8 Tesla field generated by the current magnets.

The conductor for the new superconducting dipole magnets is made from an intermetallic compound of niobium and tin (Nb₃Sn). The magnets are being developed in the framework of a collaboration between the US laboratory Fermilab and CERN. Single-bore models have already been constructed on both sides of the Atlantic, four in total. They too have reached the required 11 Tesla, but only after many quenches, so the performance of the new model was enthusiastically welcomed by the teams that have been working on the project for almost five years.

Nevertheless, the development work is far from over. The models are shorter than the final magnets will be: 2 metres in length rather than 5.5 metres. They also only have one bore, i.e. they are single dipoles producing a field that can guide only one beam. The final magnet will consist of two dipoles, i.e. two bores for the two beam pipes, in the same cryostat, just like the current LHC magnets.

The heatwave affecting many parts of Europe has been often in the news this summer, but we’ve also had plenty of “hot news” at CERN, in particular regarding the LHC and the experiments.

There’s been great excitement everywhere about the restart of the LHC. However, we should not forget just how much work was done during the long shutdown, and that in many ways it’s like starting up a new machine, with all the surprises that can bring. This year, the LHC has already run at the record-breaking collision energy of 13 TeV and now we’re seeing the careful, step-by-step procedure to increase the beam intensity. The aim, as it always was, is to have the collider up to its full performance by the end of the year, so that we can then embark on three years full of physics.

Nevertheless, the LHC experiments already have 100 times more data than they did at around the same time after the machine first started up at a collision energy of 7 TeV in 2010. This has allowed the experiments to renew their acquaintance with many “old friends” among the fundamental particles and processes of the Standard Model. It’s also already provided sufficient data for the first publication to come out of Run 2.

This was big news at the first of the year’s major international particle-physics conferences, the 2015 European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics(EPS-HEP2015), which took place recently in Vienna. Status reports on the LHC, ATLAS and CMS all figured in the main plenary sessions – and were very positively received. They included the first results at 13 TeV, with spectacular events that show the power of the energy increase. It’s clear from the conference that all eyes are on Run 2; not only particle physicists, but the physics community at large is eagerly awaiting the more significant amount of data that is to come. In the meantime, the final harvest from Run 1 continues, and can still provide exciting results, as LHCb’s discovery of a new class of particles, the pentaquarks, has amply demonstrated.

The conference also revealed a clear trend towards further exploiting the synergies between particle physics and cosmology. The two disciplines investigate two fundamental scalar fields, which appear similar and may even be connected. These are the field associated with the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism in particle physics, and one that is linked to a period of extremely rapid expansion, or “inflation”, in the very early Universe. 

Back at CERN, the latest news concerns more than the LHC. I am pleased to announce that as from today Pakistan is an Associate Member State of CERN. Official notification that Pakistan has ratified the Association Agreement arrived through diplomatic channels this morning. I am certain that you will join me in welcoming Pakistan as an Associate Member State.

As the LHC Physics conference gets underway in St Petersburg, it’s a good time to take stock of where things stand with run-2.  For all those involved with operating the LHC and its experiments in this new energy and intensity regime, 2015 was always going to be a learning curve. And learning we most certainly are. The main objective for this year has always been to set up the machine and experiments for production running at high energy and high intensity in 2016, 17 and 18.  That said, the experiments have all been able to collect quality data at 13 TeV, with the first run-2 papers and conference presentations being written and delivered this summer.

It would be unfair of me, however, to give the impression that it’s all been plain sailing. As well as the highs: smooth recommissioning of the machine, physics getting underway, and a successful transition to 25nanosecond bunch spacing, we’ve also had our fair share of lows. There have been no show-stoppers, but rather a series of more minor issues that have slowed things down. Sensitivity of the quench protection system, now fully understood and due to be rectified in the September technical stop, has cost us time. Synchrotron radiation and electron clouds become more of an issue at the energy we’re now running at, so we have to learn how to live with that. And the infamous Unidentified Falling Objects – UFOs – are back, though there is now strong evidence that these decrease with time. All in all, as time goes on, the LHC’s performance gets better, and I believe it is shaping up well to deliver good beam for the rest of 2015 and through the production phase of run-2 starting in 2016.

For the experiments, most things have gone smoothly, but many of you will be aware that the cryogenic system supplying the CMS magnet has been having some difficulty. As a result, a fraction of the data CMS has taken this year is at zero-field. As I write, the system seems to be stable, but it’s clear that there are contaminants in the cold box that supplies the magnet with liquid helium, and this will therefore need a thorough clean.  Interim measures are being taken during the technical stop, aimed at finding a way to continue to operate the magnet with an acceptable duty cycle. All being well, CMS will be able to take data satisfactorily with field on until the end of the 2015 physics programme, postponing the cleaning operation until the winter stop in order to be ready for the start of 2016.

To conclude, I’d like to congratulate everyone concerned in getting us to where we are today: on the threshold of the first LHC Physics conference with 13 TeV data on display. Along with the continuing flow of exciting results from run-1, such as the combined ATLAS-CMS result on Higgs couplings presented today, there’s much good physics to digest already from run-2. And as we approach the top of the learning curve, there’s the promise of very much more to come.

This summer, the HiRadMat (High Radiation to Materials) facility began testing the first HL-LHC collimator jaw prototypes. How they perform when bombarded with high-energy, high-intensity beams will go on to shape the particle accelerators of the future.

The HiRadMat facility uses SPS beams to test materials and accelerator components in extreme conditions. As accelerators grow more powerful, they require materials that can withstand extreme conditions of temperature and pressure as well as high levels of radiation.

In 2012, in a HiRadMat experiment, six different materials were probed for possible use in collimators and absorbers. The results (see box) saw two standout performances from molybdenum-graphite and copper-diamond. These contenders have moved forward to the next round and three full collimator jaws (one typical LHC jaw and two made with the new materials for the future HL-LHC) are being put to the test in a dedicated experiment – led by CERN’s Mechanical and Materials Engineering (EN/MME) group, with support from several groups from the EN, BE, TE and PH departments. “These novel materials have undergone several years of development and optimisation,” says Alessandro Bertarelli, team leader of the “Jaws” experiment. “They are now ready for harsh tests in their final configuration, that of a full-scale collimator jaw for the HL-LHC.”

“We are doing detailed studies in different ‘accident’ situations, and seeing how the three jaws perform,” adds Michael Guinchard, who is in charge of the experiment’s complex instrumentation and data acquisition system. “We have recreated a beam injection error situation – that’s when bunches directly impact the jaw – and, so far, have found the results agree with our simulations. By the end of the year, we hope to validate which of the jaws will be mounted in a HL-LHC collimator prototype for final qualification.”

In addition to the electrical strain gauges, temperature gauges, laser doppler vibrometer and a high speed camera that adorned the 2012 experiment, the experiment team has added a whole new host of instrumentation for 2015. “Most notably, we are using optical fibres to study the jaw while it is being hit by beams,” says Guinchard. The optical fibres are bonded directly to the surface of the jaws and, when impacted by beam, they deform. This leads to subtle changes in their signal, providing a highly sensitive picture of the jaw’s deformation, ideally complementing information from the electrical strain-gauges.

The team has also installed new ultrasound devices to map the inside of the materials. These small probes are just 8 mm in diameter and can work in high-temperature (350°C), high-radiation (1000 kGy) environments. “Ultrasounds will help us look beyond superficial damage and straight into the heart of the material,” says Federico Carra, who is in charge of HL-LHC collimator mechanical design and engineering. “Now we can detect the propagation of cracks, internal melting and other non-visible defects.”

Molybdenum-graphite has also garnered attention from outside CERN. “In addition to being shock resistant, it is very light and extremely conductive, and so could be ideal for a broad range of applications,” says Carra.  “For example, it could be used in high-end electronics, avionics or even advanced braking systems. We are working with CERN’s Knowledge Transfer group to explore further applications.”

AWAKE is the proof-of-principle experiment whose aim is to use protons to generate powerful wakefields to accelerate an electron beam. With accelerator gradients hundreds of times higher than those used in current systems, this technique could revolutionise the field of particle acceleration. Installed in the tunnel previously used by the CNGS facility, AWAKE is completing the service installation phase and will receive the plasma cell in the coming months.

AWAKE is the world’s first proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment. In AWAKE, a beam of protons from the SPS will be travelling through a plasma cell and this will generate a wakefield that, in turn, will accelerate an electron beam. A laser will ionise the gas in the plasma cell and seed the self-modulation instability that will trigger the wakefield in the plasma.

The project aims to prove that the plasma wakefield can be driven with protons and that acceleration will be extremely powerful, hundreds of times more powerful than that achieved today.

Over about 18 months of hard work, the teams have cleared the old CNGS area – leaving only the infrastructure that will be reused by AWAKE – and have modified the services to meet AWAKE’s needs. “We dismantled 100 metres of the proton beam line, completed the civil-engineering needed to house the new electron and laser beam lines, removed several kilometres of old cables, and installed some 100 kilometres of new cables,” says Edda Gschwendtner, CERN AWAKE project leader. “We have installed the 16 magnets for the proton line for AWAKE, built the laser clean room, modified the access and cooling and ventilation… It has been a huge amount of work in a very short time.”

Integrating a new experiment into an existing facility is extremely challenging, but now that the area has been cleared and is ready for the future installations, Ans Pardons, AWAKE’s Coordination Package Leader for Integration and Installation, speaks with a smile: “It has been a challenging time for the CERN teams and the collaborating institutes involved in the project, but we can’t relax yet! We are now looking forward to installing the various beam and diagnostics components and starting to test them.”

One of AWAKE’s core components is the 10-metre-long plasma cell that will be arriving in the tunnel in a couple of months. A first prototype has successfully completed commissioning tests in CERN's North Area where the uniformity of the plasma temperature in the cell has been validated. The installation of the plasma cell in the AWAKE tunnel will be followed by the installation of the laser, the vacuum equipment and the diagnostic system for both laser and proton beams. In March 2016, the proton line, the laser and the experimental equipment will be ready for hardware commissioning, and beam commissioning will start in the summer. “Next year will continue to be very intense for the whole collaboration,” confirms Edda. “Indeed, in parallel to starting physics using the proton beam line, we will continue the installation of the electron line with the aim of starting the acceleration tests in 2017.”

If everything goes as planned, the AWAKE collaboration hopes to measure the first wakefields in the plasma cell in about one year from now

The NA62 Gigatracker is a jewel of technology: its sensor, which delivers the time of the crossing particles with a precision of less than 200 picoseconds (better than similar LHC detectors), has a cooling system that might become the precursor to a completely new detector technique.

The NA62 Gigatracker (GTK) is composed of a set of three innovative silicon pixel detectors, whose job is to measure the arrival time and the position of the incoming beam particles. Installed in the heart of the NA62 detector, the silicon sensors are cooled down (to about -20 degrees Celsius) by a microfluidic silicon device. “The cooling system is needed to remove the heat produced by the readout chips the silicon sensor is bonded to,” explains Alessandro Mapelli, microsystems engineer working in the Physics department. “For the NA62 Gigatracker we have designed a cooling plate on top of which both the silicon sensor and the readout chip are bonded.”

One hundred and fifty microchannels are etched in the ultrathin silicon cooling plate in which a coolant circulates and keeps the whole system at its operating temperature. Each of the microchannels is just 70 µm deep and the silicon plate is only a few dozen µm thicker. This means that the microchannel cooling system can be implemented in silicon trackers as the additional material the beam particles have to cross is minimised and therefore the influence on the particle track is reduced significantly compared to traditional cooling methods. The stable low temperature helps to reduce the radiation damage to the detector and therefore increases its lifetime in the harsh environment.

In the NA62 GTK, the sensors, readout electronics and cooling plates are all made of silicon. This is why the natural evolution scientists are thinking of is the integration of all the three components in one single device. “This is what we call a 'monolithic device',” explains Mapelli. “In particle physics experiments, it is very important to reduce the amount of material used in high-precision detectors. A single device incorporating the sensing layer, the electronics, and the services, such as the cooling, would be a very compact and thin system. It would also be less fragile than the current systems because it would require fewer manipulations. Finally, it would be more effective as the distance between the point where the heat is produced – namely the readout chip – and the coolant would be minimised.”

Experts in the CERN Physics department are currently working on future developments of this technology for high-energy physics detectors and beyond, as this technique could also be used in high-density computing, medical imaging and, more generally, in fields where images with sub-nanosecond time-measurement precision are used.