Visualisation of the MoEDAL array in the LHCb cavern (Image: MoEDAL Collaboration).
MoEDAL - the LHC experiment designed to search for highly ionising avatars of new physics, such as magnetic monopoles or massive pseudo-stable charged particles - has collected data from p-p and Pb-Pb collisions at high energy. Read more in the Bulletin.
On Thursday, 11 February, Barry Clark Barish, one of the fathers of the LIGO experiment, presented the latest results in a packed Auditorium.
Almost exactly one hundred years after the publication of Einstein’s paper on General Relativity, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have published a paper in which they show a gravitational signal emitted by the merger of two black holes. The signal has been observed with 5-sigma accuracy and is the first direct observation of gravitational waves. Read more in the Bulletin.
The violet light is produced by the argon plasma used when sputtering the amorphous carbon. The the beam screen is coated using the magnetic field of the quadrupole itself. ((mage : Pedro Costa Pinto).
The electron cloud problem needs to be addressed with innovative solutions, particularly in view of the rapidly approaching HL-LHC upgrade. CERN’s Vacuum, Surfaces and Coatings group has greatly improved its amorphous carbon coating technique, which is an alternative to the scrubbing process used so far. This technique is now fully mature and is being used for the vacuum chambers of the SPS magnets and the delicate beam screens of the LHC’s quadrupole triplets. Read more in the Bulletin.
Arts@CERN Guest Artists, Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch. (Photo : Scott Leyse)
Arts@CERN is delighted to invite you to the Guest Artists' presentation at the Main Auditorium, CERN starting at 17:15.
Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b.1972, Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.
Presentation organised in collaboration with GOSH! 2016
The Guest Artists is organised in partnership with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), and Liverpool University.
Programme
17:15 Intro Arts@CERN in collaboration with GOSH! 2016
17:30 Tom Igoe on Open Source Hardware in Science.
18:00 Welcome Speech by Monica Bello, Head of Arts@CERN, and by Tara Shears Experimental Particle Physicist.
18:10 Arts@CERN Guest Artists, Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch.
Mozilla Study Groups, supported by the Mozilla Science Lab, are the brain-child of former ATLAS physicist Bill Mills. They are regular meet-ups for students, scientists, IT experts, librarians and communicators to improve their coding or data-analysis skills as well as to learn (about) new software tools. Two weeks ago, a CERN chapter was launched by Patricia Herterich, Tim Head, Igor Babuschkin and Achintya Rao.
The group plans to meet every Friday evening, with the sessions ranging from co-working gatherings to lessons taught by experienced coders. This Friday (4 March) at 17:00, Tim Head will introduce participants to Jupyter Notebooks, which enable browser-based interactive computing in a variety of programming languages.
Information on joining the Study Group is available on the group's website and on the GitHub repository for the group. You can also find members of the Study Group on Gitter.
Anyone at CERN is welcome to join the Study Group and propose sessions. If there is something you would like to learn or if you would like to teach a lesson yourself, you can submit your suggestions by creating an issue on GitHub.
All types of people… all ages… all the time…
Today we live in increasingly noisy environments due to television, headphones, transport, machines at work, leisure activities, etc. Health specialists confirm that all this regular noise exposure is linked to a rise in the early onset of noise-related conditions (tinnitus, deafness, etc.). This hazard affects people young and old, at work as well as at home. Noise is part of our daily lives and yet we hardly notice it anymore!
Our ears… a fragile mechanism…
Our ability to hear rests on a fragile mechanism that is easily damaged, often irreparably. At the centre of the ear are cells (hair cells) that transfer information to our brain. These cells normally deteriorate over time, but do so more quickly under the effect of intense and/or repeated noise until they no longer work. The cells do not regenerate; the effects are irreversible. There is currently no medical treatment for this ailment. As with all other senses, hearing loss negatively impacts your social and professional life.
CERN’s population, representative of society...
The WHO (World Health Organisation) estimates that 16% of the world’s population suffers from hearing problems. In July 2015, CERN’s Medical Service carried out a screening programme for hearing difficulties. Out of 68 people tested, 13 had an abnormal audiogram: 19%! Hearing loss affected all age groups: 18-30 year olds as well as the over-40s.
23% of people tested were exposed to high noise levels as part of their work. 43% of people tested confirmed that they were exposed to noise in their private lives, in particular when playing or listening to music (some of them also suffered noise exposure at work).
However, about a third of participants thought they were not particularly exposed to noise!
Prevention… simple actions
On a daily basis, in your private life and at work, limiting your exposure to intense and/or repeated noise from a young age would seem to be the best approach… but it’s not always easy.
On this ‘hearing’ day, CERN offers you the opportunity:
Finally, from now onwards, (even if you “haven’t heard”), try to take regular daily breaks away from noise.
*Service available all year round.
The resulting vulnerabilities lay dormant until the evil side spots them and decides to hit hard. Computer security incidents in the past have put CERN’s reputation at risk due to websites being defaced with negative messages about the Organization, hash files of passwords being extracted, restricted data exposed… And it all started with a little bit of negligence!
If you check out the Top 10 web development blunders, you will see that the most prevalent mistakes in web development are:
There are plenty of possibilities to screw up, but there is no need to. Following a small number of quick and easy steps can make your web application watertight and secure. Learn how to prevent security incidents from happening by following a dedicated hands-on course on “Developing Secure Software”. The next course is scheduled for 14 March and there are still a few places left, so register quickly…
Once you have followed that course and are longing for more, the CERN Computer Security team together with a world renowned “white hat” from the network team are providing in-depth training courses on penetration testing and vulnerability scanning. So far, more than 100 people have joined our hands-on training. Do you want to become a hacker too? Sign up now!
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.
Access the entire collection of Computer Security articles here.
The Future Circular Collider study for a hadron-hadron collider (FCC-hh) foresees a collision energy of 100 TeV, which is about seven times higher than that of the LHC. For the experiments, this means that a much higher magnetic field is needed in order to bend the trajectories of particles within the detector volume, allowing the subsequent determination the basic properties of each particle from its trajectory and its ability to traverse matter.
One of the conceptual detector magnet designs currently being developed for FCC-hh is the twin solenoid and dipole detector magnet assembly, featuring a combination of very large superconducting magnets. The combination of solenoids and dipoles in close proximity presents a major engineering challenge. In terms of its size, this system is unlike any existing detector. The stored magnetic energy of 56 GJ and the corresponding cold mass of about 4000 tonnes are over 20 times higher than in the CMS detector, the current record holder with a stored energy of 2.7 GJ and a cold mass of 220 tonnes. In addition, the system also includes vacuum vessels, a support structure, trackers, calorimeters and muon chambers, for a total weight of 30,000 tonnes.
The unique configuration would provide substantial bending power for particles travelling in all directions. Bending particles with a solenoidal magnetic field works well for particles travelling perpendicular to the beam but less well for those travelling almost parallel to the beam, as the solenoidal field is also oriented parallel to the beam and does not influence its trajectory. For this purpose, superconducting dipoles are positioned in the forward direction, in which the field orientation is perpendicular to the beam, so that even the trajectories of particles travelling in the forward direction obtain a curvature.
Moving on from the experiments to the accelerator itself, experts in the Technology department at CERN have presented a first concept for the main bending magnets of the FCC electron collider (FCC-ee). This machine requires about 65 km of such magnets, to steer the counter-rotating electron and positron beams, before they collide at collision energies of 350 GeV.
The proposed design features a twin-aperture geometry, with a common iron yoke and two busbars, operated at room temperature. The FCC-ee does not require high dipole fields, therefore superconducting technology is not needed.
The design is very compact: at the moment the cross-section fits onto an A3 sheet. The concept will be further refined to match the evolving requirements of the other FCC-ee work packages, including those on beam dynamics and vacuum.
For more information about the FCC study, please visit the dedicated website.
So you dashed off a reply to that query with a short and factually informative e-mail, stressing the key points and keeping the niceties to a minimum, convinced that your interlocutor would appreciate the efficiency and speed with which you reacted… and you were genuinely surprised when you realised from their response that something had clearly gone awry.
These misunderstandings do happen because there can be a gap between what is said by one and what is understood by others. This gap widens in written communication, where the words are not attenuated by non-verbal aspects such as tone or gesture. If your well-intentioned and factual message or response to a query has been perceived as excessively curt or even disrespectful, you can still do something to fix the problem.
Start by following up on the exchange and acknowledging the gap between your intentions and the way it was received, as this will demonstrate your willingness to repair any inadvertently negative impact. The next step is to seek feedback in order to understand the other person’s objections and share your own point of view in order to clear the misunderstanding and move forward together.
Taking this kind of action to follow up on reactions usually has a positive impact on others, and, by making it a learning conversation where you take the time to listen and acknowledge their perspectives, you may gain an insight into your own communication style, which will help you not only to remedy the situation at hand but also more generally in your everyday interactions. The key lies in keeping an open mind and overcoming any natural feelings of defensiveness by focusing on your genuine wish to be respectful and to maintain a good working relationship.
Communication, however, is a two-way process and responsibility for such a misunderstanding does not lie only with the sender of the message – but also with those on the receiving end whose negative reactions may have been influenced by their own personal history or circumstances.
So if you are on the other end of this exchange and you find yourself tempted to challenge the tone or wording of an e-mail you have just received, you should stop to reconsider the sender’s intentions before shooting off an aggressive e-mail in response. Perhaps they have always been encouraged to keep e-mails as brief and specific as possible? Do they operate in a culture where this communication style is the norm? Are they even aware of the risk that they may be perceived negatively? At the same time, it may be useful to reflect on your own intentions – by responding abrasively would you not be stooping to a counter-attack, which simply sets off an e-mail exchange that will ultimately be disrespectful and counter-productive?
Regardless of on which side of such an e-mail exchange you may find yourself, it is always going to be in your interest to build the relationship, rather than to damage it! A well-intentioned conversation to share perspectives and address the situation is the best way forward… and, if possible, as you will undoubtedly agree, a face-to-face discussion to clear the air is always going to be more effective than e-mail!
| Contact the Ombud Early! |
All previous Ombud's Corners can be accessed in the Ombud's blog.
ATLAS and CERN celebrate International Women’s Day
8 March – ATLAS Collaboration and Paola Catapano
In honour of International Women’s Day, the ATLAS experiment shared the stories of seven women from the collaboration. “There are many misconceptions about our work as physicists,” says ATLAS physicist Reina Coromoto Camacho Toro. “Physics relates to everyday events but it still remains foreign to most people and this needs to change."
CERN showcases some of the great women who have broken down barriers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) through the six decades of CERN’s history.
Continue to read here and watch the video here...
In Theory: why bother with theoretical physics?
8 March- by Harriet Kim Jarlett
In the second feature in our In Theory series we explore what it takes to make someone a theoretical physicist. Boring and complicated are words often associated with people’s impression of physics in general. For some theoreticians working at CERN, physics wasn’t the career they saw for themselves – their own lessons in the subject were dull and off-putting. Instead they imagined themselves as mathematicians, doctors and engineers.
It took teachers with a true passion for the subject – who saw beyond the mathematics to the fundamental questions it answers about nature – to show these future physicists their true calling. For others, while it would take them time to discover theoretical physics, their love of the subject was ignited by childhood pleasures long before anyone could make it seem boring.
Historic moment as SESAME begins storage ring installation
8 March – by Harriet Kim Jarlett
The first of the 16 cells of SESAME’s storage ring was installed recently in the shielding tunnel in the Center’s experimental hall in Allan, Jordan. SESAME will be the Middle East’s first synchrotron light source.
After many years in the making, commissioning of SESAME is scheduled to begin in 2016, serving a growing community of some 300 scientists from the region.
UK launches Institute for Research in Schools
4 March – by James Gilles
On 3 March, the Institute for Research in Schools, IRIS, was launched. Building on the CERN@school initiative, IRIS provides opportunities and support for school students and their teachers to take part in authentic research in school.
Among the Institute’s key aims are nurturing the potential and ability of young people to contribute to the scientific community, increasing the uptake of post-16 maths, science and technology courses, increasing applications for STEM subjects at university, especially among girls, enhancing teachers’ expertise and job satisfaction in order to retain and recruit more to the profession, and engaging Universities and Industry in sustained interaction with schools.
Congratulations to SuperKEKB for “first turns"
28 February – ALICE Collaboration
Congratulations to the SuperKEKB electron-positron collider in Tsukuba, Japan. On 10 February, the collider succeeded in circulating and storing a positron beam moving close to the speed of light through more than a thousand magnets in a narrow tube around the 3-kilometre circumference of its main ring. Then, on 26 February, it succeeded in circulating and storing an electron beam around its ring of magnets in the opposite direction. The achievement of "first turns", which means storing the beam in the ring through many revolutions, is a major milestone for any particle accelerator.
Focus on: Siegfried Förtsch
28 February – ALICE Collaboration
Siegfried Förtsch is the new run coordinator for the ALICE experiment. The ALICE Matters team would like to wish Siegfried a successful, exciting and problem-free year of run coordination. We would also like to thank Federico Ronchetti, his predecessor, for the amazing work he did over the past two years.
For Siegfried, this is not just a personal achievement: “I am proud, but I am mainly happy for my institute and for my country. South Africa is a small but growing player, not only in ALICE, but also in ATLAS and ISOLDE, the other experiments in which the country is involved.”
A Distribution Feed-Box (DFB) brings power to the LHC magnets and maintains the stability of the current in the superconducting circuits.
The LHC was the last machine to be handed back to operators after the completion of maintenance work carried out during the Year-End Technical Stop (YETS) that had started on 14 December, 2015.
During the eleven weeks of scheduled maintenance activities, several operations took place in all the accelerators and beam lines. They included the maintenance in several points of the cryogenic system, the replacement of 18 magnets in the Super Proton Synchrotron; an extensive campaign to identify and remove thousands of obsolete cables; the replacement of the LHC beam absorbers for injection (TDIs) that are used to absorb the SPS beam if a problem occurs, providing vital protection for the LHC; the dismantling and reinstallation of twelve LHC collimators in order to modify the vacuum chambers, which restricted their movement; upgrades to the beam instrumentation, including various beam monitors, with further upgrades scheduled for the next Extended Year-End Technical Stop (EYETS) starting in December; and several electrical maintenance operations to ensure a stable operation of the machines.
The YETS also gave the experiments the opportunity to carry out repairs and maintenance work on their detectors. In particular, for ATLAS, this meant fixing the vacuum chamber bellow and installing new cables for triggering and controlling, as well as new water-cooling cables; at CMS, the cold box, which had caused problems for the experiment’s magnet during 2015, was cleaned and various water leaks on the site were fixed.
Bringing back beams to the machine after a technical stop of a few weeks is no trivial thing. The Electrical Quality Assurance (ELQA) team needed to test the electrical circuits of the superconducting magnets, certifying their readiness for operation – that is, their capability to withstand the high voltages that might occur during powering. All specified circuits were successfully validated after fixing some very minor non-conformities. The teams also checked the correct functioning of the redundant powering that is used in the event of an electrical power cut to protect critical systems in the machine. During the checks, some critical problems appeared; they will be fixed before the machine receives beam.
On 4 March, after completing all the preparatory activities, the powering tests of the superconducting circuits were able to start. These are joint effort of many groups across three different departments – including experts on magnet and power converters, protection and interlock, planning and operation – and this requires good collaboration, preparation and coordination of the various activities. In less than two weeks, over 7000 tests are being performed on the 1600 circuits. Even though the tests are executed automatically, the experts in charge of running and analysing them need to pay careful attention to the thousands of multi-coloured signals on their screens.
At present, more than three quarters of the tests have been performed, proving the capability of the circuits to reach the values needed for operation during Run 2. The target is close, but attention has to remain high to be able to start the final checks in just a few days before accepting beams in the machine. Soon, yet another commissioning period will be over with the beams expected back in the LHC in a couple of weeks.
The participants to the GOSH! 2016 meeting gathered in IdeaSquare. (Image: GOSH Community)
“Despite advances in technology, many scientific innovations are held back because of a lack of affordable and customisable hardware,” says François Grey, Professor at the University of Geneva and coordinator of Citizen Cyberlab – a partnership between CERN, the UN Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva – who co-organised the GOSH! 2016 workshop. “This scarcity of accessible science hardware is particularly obstructive for citizen science groups or humanitarian organisations that don’t have the same economic means as a well-funded institution.” Instead, open sourcing science hardware could lower instrumentation costs, thereby increasing access for an ever-wider range of people, while also allowing reuse and customisation.
GOSH! is a meeting specifically about open-source hardware for science, the first of its kind, even though the debate on general open-source hardware has been active worldwide for over 5 years ago through initiatives such as the Open Source Hardware Association and CERN’s pioneering Open Hardware Repository and Open Hardware Licence. About 50 people, including open hardware users and developers from many different science domains as well as experts in relevant legal and economic matters, gathered at IdeaSquare to turn an ensemble of dispersed groups of early adopters into a cohesive and self-organised community, paving the way for the future.
To this end, the GOSH! meeting had dual objectives. “We united scientists and developers of open-source instruments for science from very different disciplines, such as synthetic biology, cosmic-ray detectors, neuroscience education, etc.,” says Jenny Molloy, a co-organiser of GOSH! from the University of Cambridge. “In this way, they can learn how each one is tackling the challenge of getting more openness into hardware.”
The second aim of the GOSH! meeting was to discuss the big future challenges that members of the open science hardware community must address in order to create a common roadmap, to promote the movement and ultimately to drive social change towards openness within their groups or institutions. Among the many questions that need to be addressed were legal aspects – i.e. how to protect an open source hardware creation – and economic issues.
Indeed, exploring many possible business solutions to make open science hardware a sustainable endeavor is particularly important. Discussions on the economic viability of open-source business focused on two aspects: firstly, as openness in hardware can greatly lower the barrier to entry for manufacturers, new markets can materialise, especially in low-resource environments. Secondly, the commercialisation of an open science hardware product is not in contradiction with it being open source. It also brings substantial benefits to consumers: “‘Open’ doesn’t mean that one has to design and build everything from scratch in the lab,” says Javier Serrano, a CERN engineer and the founder of the Open Hardware Repository, who gave the keynote speech at the meeting. “Instead, the fact that you can find precise details about an open hardware design should mean greater assurance about its reliability and reproducibility as more people work on it, thus improving the quality. The commercialisation of open designs gives researchers more options to buy hardware ready-made or in kit form and then modify it as needed, thus reducing the duplication of effort,” explains Javier.
Beyond economic savings and alternative revenue streams, there is at least one additional invaluable benefit tied to open-source hardware: trust in science. “Being fully open about instruments, methods and the resulting data provides a stronger basis for trusting scientific results. For example, the Safecast project, an open-source radiation monitor, has become a trusted reference for tracking radiation after Fukushima, and it has even been acknowledged by the Japanese government,” concludes François.
Last year marked a great start to Run 2. The objective for the year was to establish proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV with 25 ns bunch spacing, and in that we were successful, delivering four inverse femtobarns (4 fb-1) of data to the experiments. This was a great result but, to put it into context, the goal for the whole of Run 2 is to deliver 100 fb-1 by the end of 2018, so we still have a long way to go. 2015 was a learning year, and by the time we switched off for the end-of-year break, we had learned a great deal about how to operate this superb machine at the new higher energy, with shorter bunch spacing allowing us to get many more bunches of particles into the beam and thereby deliver more data to the experiments.
This year is the first full production year of Run 2 and our goal is to deliver 25 fb-1 during the proton-proton run, before switching to heavy ions as usual towards the end of the year. As always, safety will be our first concern, so we’ve scheduled around four weeks of beam commissioning before we declare stable beams. Then we’ll start with low intensity, before increasing steadily in intensity towards the target of 2748 bunches per beam in early summer.
It would be easy to think that LHC running is becoming routine, and in many ways it is. Nevertheless, the year-end technical stop is a vital part of the running cycle and much has been accomplished over this short winter break. I’d therefore like to thank everyone, from both the machine and experiment teams, for the great work accomplished and the fantastic team spirit that has reigned throughout.
Joel Butler, the new CMS spokesperson. (Image: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab)
On 10 February, members of the CMS Collaboration Board, the “parliament” of the collaboration, held a ballot to appoint their next leader. The Board chose Joel Butler, who brings a wealth of experience – more than thirty years at Fermilab and more than ten of those with CMS – to this important management role, leading a collaboration of 3000 people from across the globe.
High on Joel’s priority list is making sure that all collaborators are able to participate in the collaboration’s research easily and to the best of their abilities: “We need everybody to be involved in CMS, whether they’re big or small institutions,” he says in his office in CERN’s Building 42. “We need to have the maximum engagement that we can get to handle all the tasks that we have because the task list is longer now than it’s ever been before.”
Prior to joining Fermilab, Joel earned a degree in Physics from Harvard University before pursuing a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from MIT. Since joining the CMS collaboration in 2005, he has contributed to several endeavours, including the US efforts on the Forward Pixel Tracker and the upgrade project. He led the overall US participation in the collaboration from 2007 until the end of 2013.
When he takes over at the helm later this year, CMS will have moved its Run 2 data collection into a higher gear: “These will be years of tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. I think the opportunities are obvious: by the end of this period we’ll have close to 100 fb–1 of data. We should get the first 30 by the end of this year. It will be enormously exciting to see what nature has in store for us.”
While Joel has spent much of his career studying flavour physics, he prefers not to narrow his personal expectations of what CMS might discover over the coming years. “I’m a particle physicist, I want to go find out what’s there. I don’t have too many profound prejudices over what it should be. I think - I hope - we will see new physics soon. But even if we don’t find anything quickly, we still will have a long, long way to go. We have to continue to upgrade CMS and to cast a broad net out wide to try to catch what’s out there, because we really don’t know what the new physics might be or how much data we need to capture it, " he affirms.
“I think we’ve constructed a fantastic detector that’s very well suited to the physics that we’re trying to explore. That’s an extreme compliment to our founding fathers, who designed a great detector.” To ensure that CMS can continue this fruitful exploration, Joel points out that the collaboration has crucial technical tasks in the coming months, such as installing a new pixel tracker as well as new sensors for the Hadron Calorimeter over the next Year-End Technical Stop.
Joel takes the reins from a distinguished line of previous spokespersons. He has worked closely with many of them in the past and says he expects to apply what he has learnt from each of them when he starts his term. “I’ve been on the Management Board and the Executive Board as an advisor to all of them since I joined. The experience that our former spokespersons and many other people in CMS have had over the years is invaluable and had to be a guidepost to our future. We have to take advantage of that experience.” However, he is aware of the value of change: “Every successful organisation has to continually try to make successive improvements or it will essentially get stagnant. While CMS is enormously successful, there are things we can do better.”
Understandably, Joel is excited to take over his new role in a collaboration in which he has worked for a long time: “I think CMS is an absolutely spectacular collection of people that are really passionate and committed to doing physics. They have tremendous technical and analytical skills and are a pleasure to work with,” he says. “It’s a tremendous honour to be chosen to do this and I’m going to try to do my best for everybody.”
An expert in the LASA Laboratory (INFN Milan, Italy) works on assembling the first sextupole corrector of the HL-LHC.
Although the name might sound completely unfamiliar, superferric magnets were first proposed in the 1980s as a possible solution for high-energy colliders. However, many technical problems needed to be overcome before the use of superferric magnets could become a reality. In its final configuration, the HL-LHC will have 36 superferric corrector magnets, of which 4 will be quadrupoles, 8 sextupoles and 24 higher order magnets.
In superferric (or “iron-dominated”) magnets, iron is used in the poles that shape the field, in addition to in the yoke as in a standard superconducting magnet, while the coils are made of superconducting material that is kept at cryogenic temperatures to reduce power losses to a minimum. Superferric magnets have been shown to be highly reliable and this is no trivial requirement for machines like the HL-LHC in which, during normal operations, high-intensity beams will have to complete hundreds of millions of turns in stable conditions before being safely dumped by the operators.
A superferric corrector magnet was developed by CIEMAT for the SLHC-PP study, and that design was used as a starting point for the HL-LHC correctors. Subsequently, in the framework of a CERN-INFN Collaboration Agreement for the HL-LHC project signed in 2013, the LASA laboratory of the Milan section of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) has taken over as a partner in the project. “At LASA, we dealt with the design, assembly and testing of the magnet,” explains Giovanni Volpini from INFN Milano. “This was possible thanks to the expertise the laboratory has acquired working on many of the most important superconducting magnets for high-energy physics. However, this is the first time in many years that a full-size superconducting magnet has been developed entirely in-house. We are very happy with the results of the recent tests: the magnet has shown high stability, as it could reach and surpass the ultimate field value required by the design specifications before quenching. The ultimate field we measured was almost 10% above the nominal operating field. Magnet stability will be a key feature to guarantee the overall reliability of the whole beam corrector system once all the hardware components have been installed in the tunnel.” “The partnership between INFN and CERN has been key in achieving this result and it will be as fundamental as the other collaborations in the HL-LHC project in meeting the project’s goals,” confirms Paolo Fessia from the Technology Department, who is in charge of the project on the CERN side.
Now that the first piece of hardware has proven that superferric technology works as expected, HL-LHC and INFN experts will go on to finalise the design of the other corrector magnets. In parallel, other groups in various institutes around the world are developing, building and testing other HL-LHC components, including the highly challenging high-field magnets. The new ring is starting to take shape.
HL-LHC in brief HL-LHC is the project that aims at increasing the current LHC luminosity by a factor of 10, thus extending the discovery potential of the machine significantly. In order to achieve this, 1.2 km of the existing accelerator will be replaced by new components, namely: innovative niobium-tin superconducting magnets; new radiofrequency cavities known as “crab cavities”; a new generation of collimators; and powerful magnesium-diboride-based superconducting cables capable of transporting huge electrical currents. HL-LHC is a collaborative and international effort that involves a number of specialised institutes around the world. For more details, please click here. |
Mozilla Study Groups, supported by the Mozilla Science Lab, are the brain-child of former ATLAS physicist Bill Mills. They are regular meet-ups for students, scientists, IT experts, librarians and communicators to improve their coding or data-analysis skills as well as to learn (about) new software tools. Two weeks ago, a CERN chapter was launched by Patricia Herterich, Tim Head, Igor Babuschkin and Achintya Rao.
The group plans to meet every Friday evening, with the sessions ranging from co-working gatherings to lessons taught by experienced coders. This Friday (4 March) at 17:00, Tim Head will introduce participants to Jupyter Notebooks, which enable browser-based interactive computing in a variety of programming languages.
Information on joining the Study Group is available on the group's website and on the GitHub repository for the group. You can also find members of the Study Group on Gitter.
Anyone at CERN is welcome to join the Study Group and propose sessions. If there is something you would like to learn or if you would like to teach a lesson yourself, you can submit your suggestions by creating an issue on GitHub.
The Sharing Knowledge Foundation awarded its 2016 prize to George Mikenberg, a member of the LHC's ATLAS experiment who has been well-known in the particle physics world for many years. He received the prize in a ceremony held at CERN on 18 March.
The Sharing Knowledge Foundation, led by former CERN Director of Research Robert Klapisch, recently created the prize as a way of honouring individuals working to improve dialogue between scientists from around the Mediterranean region or to establish networks leading to concrete projects focusing on sustainable development or reducing inequalities between nations.
Mikenberg has participated in prestigious experiments at Fermilab, DESY and CERN, where he has spent the last few years working on the ATLAS muon spectrometer. However, it was his contribution to the dissemination of knowledge, his almost daily involvement in the training of young researchers from all backgrounds and his constant efforts to help people, institutes and countries join ambitious fundamental research and technological development programmes to which the Foundation wished to draw attention.
The Foundation was particularly keen to recognise Mikenberg's role in Israel’s accession to CERN Membership status and his support for physicists from countries such as Morocco, Chile and Argentina. It also praised the support he provides to students keen to be part of the CERN adventure, especially Palestinian students hoping to promote a science culture in their homeland.
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.
Access the entire collection of Computer Security articles here.
Stefan Lueders, Computer Security team
Genevieve Guinot, head of the diversity office, answers some questions about what it is really like to work in a diverse organization like CERN.
If you’re looking to learn from different perspectives and approaches, you could be interested in working in a diverse environment. But. if you are truly convinced the cross-fertilisation of ideas boosts creativity and innovation, you should be interested in working for a diverse organization like CERN.
Working in a diverse environment is enriching and rewarding, and requires an openness to other cultures, a welcome approach to hearing viewpoints different to one’s own.
One of our key priorities is to achieve an optimal gender balance in our workforce. Particle physics and accelerator-related technologies remain male-dominated fields and CERN’s ambition is to attract more women. Having said that, CERN can claim a number of female role models, in all professional families and at all stages of their career, who show that it’s possible to make a scientific or technical career at CERN, starting with our new Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti.
We may lack as yet the critical mass to have a visible effect, in particular in senior staff positions, but things are changing. We are seeing more and more women holding key leadership positions for example, Edda Gschwendtner, leader of the AWAKE project, or Maite Barroso Lopez who has recently taken up the position of Deputy Head of the IT Department.
Diversity -- bringing together people from different countries and cultures to work on a common goal -- has been an integral part of CERN’s mission since its foundation. CERN is becoming an increasingly global laboratory. We know that greater awareness and understanding of difference is needed, and that requires constant vigilance and commitment. That is one reason, amongst others, why the Organization set up an office specialising in Diversity issues back in 2012.
As a culturally diverse organization, the first evidence you would see of diversity at CERN is the mix of nationalities - on a normal day there are more than 10,000 people on-site from over one hundred different countries. But this isn’t the only facet of diversity that you would see first off: you might also notice that CERN has a multi-generational working environment. Indeed, in addition to its staff members spanning all ages, CERN welcomes on-site students at every stage of their studies (undergrads, graduates and postgrads) and some retirees are still coming to CERN to share their passion after ending their career.
CERN’s first equal opportunity statement was published in 1996 and, as an employer, tolerates no form of discrimination between members of its personnel, in particular with regard to nationality, gender, age, profession and individual differences such as belief, opinion, sexual orientation or disability. In recent years, CERN has implemented a diversity policy, which extends beyond legal compliance and is intended to enable each of us, irrespective of our individual differences, to contribute to our full potential. When we talk about diversity, we mean the wide range of differences, visible and invisible, which exist amongst all peoples. And by working on diversity we mean all sorts of actions from monitoring our organisational practices and processes, and organising activities designed to raise awareness, through to constantly updating our support structures.
A very good example to illustrate the latter is CERN’s recent upgrade of its family and work-life balance policies. If you want to learn more, consult the following webpage: http://diversity.web.cern.ch/diversity-measures-5-yearly-review.
You can read the full interview here.
CERN is also hosting three events in the coming months to celebrate what it means to be a woman in particle physics. These are:
“Support to early careers in science at CERN. Understanding expectations” – a talk presenting the results of a research study carried out at CERN by three social scientists and takes a gender perspective.
“Curie_Meitner_Lamarr_indivisible” a play celebrating the achievements of three exceptional women in the field of science and technology. Registration for this opens soon.
“A singularly unfeminine profession” – a book presentation by Mary K Gaillard followed by a discussion with Valerie Gibson (LHCb, Head of the HEP Group in Cambridge, UK).
Follow the links for more details.
Inauguration of the CERN Mobility Centre by Martin Steinacher, Director for Finance and Human Resources, and Lluis Miralles, Head of the SMB department.
CERN’s new Mobility Centre, on the car park next to the Globe of Science and Innovation was officially opened on Tuesday, 22 March. The centre brings together all of CERN’s transport options in a single location. "Our aim is to create an intermodal hub where CERN users and personnel can switch from one mode of transport to another, and from CERN transport to public transport," explains Lluis Miralles, head of the Site Management and Buildings (SMB) department.
The Mobility Centre incorporates the CERN bike and car rental services, the self-service car- and bike-sharing schemes, and SIXT car rental facilities (for long-distance journeys). It is located right next to the tram stop and the CERN shuttle bus stop.
"We have diversified our transport offer in the past few years in order to facilitate the journeys of users and personnel, and these services are going from strength to strength," adds Miralles.
Another piece of good news on the mobility front: the cycle path along the Route de l’Europe, connecting CERN's Meyrin and Prévessin sites, is under construction and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
For practical information about the Mobility Centre, see the announcement or visit the CERN mobility website.
