The Etat de Genève and CERN are today announcing the imminent start of work just outside the CERN site to create the brand-new Esplanade des Particules, a space worthy of Europe’s leading laboratory for particle physics. At the gateway into Geneva and Switzerland, CERN is already a top visitor attraction and enjoys global renown. The project will integrate the Laboratory better into the local urban landscape, making it more open and more easily accessible. Work will begin on 18 April and will last for a period of 16 months.

The idea for an Esplanade des Particules came jointly from the République et Canton de Genève, CERN and the Commune de Meyrin. A competition was launched in 2011 for a redesign of the Route de Meyrin intended to showcase the public entrance to CERN. The landscape architects Studio Paolo Bürgi of Ticino won this international competition with their design for a large space dedicated to pedestrians and sustainable modes of transport, connecting CERN’s Reception to the Globe of Science and Innovation, a symbol of CERN and of sustainable development, donated to the Organization by the Swiss Confederation.

In 2016, more than 120 000 people from all over the world visited CERN. In order to facilitate access for this ever-growing number of visitors, the Esplanade des Particules will be a public space aimed at sharing CERN’s creative and dynamic atmosphere, with local and international visitors alike.

40% of the project is financed by the Swiss Confederation in the framework of the urban development project and the remaining 60% is split between the Canton de Genève, CERN and the Commune de Meyrin. “As a cross-border international organisation, CERN embodies the spirit of Grand Genève and I’m happy that this project, which is worthy of this emblematic institution, is coming to fruition,” said Mr Luc Barthassat, state councillor in charge of the Department of the Environment, Transport and Agriculture.

“As with the Globe of Science and Innovation, which symbolises our desire to welcome the general public, the Esplanade des Particules will further demonstrate CERN’s openness to the city of Geneva and to the world,” said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General. “We are looking forward to working with all of our partners to continue to develop the space around the Globe.”

The Esplanade des Particules is a public space comprising several key features:

• The current Flags Car Park will be replaced by a blue-coloured pedestrianised area that will extend as far as the Globe.
• A forest of national flags will cross the Route de Meyrin to link CERN’s main site with the Globe, symbolising CERN’s international collaboration.
• A large number of covered bike racks will be constructed.
• The Route de Meyrin will continue to serve road traffic but the speed limit will be reduced to 50 km/h at the point where it crosses through the public area.

“We are pleased to be participating in this project, which will increase CERN’s visibility in the local area,” said Mr Pierre Alain Tschudi, administrative councillor for the Commune de Meyrin. “This work is fully in line with Meyrin’s desire to create attractive and pleasant public spaces to help us all to live together in harmony.”

Impacts of the work on transport:

• The Route de Meyrin will remain open.
• Public transport (bus Y and tram 18) will continue to operate.
• CERN’s entrances will remain accessible.

To know more, watch the video and the see the photos of the design.

All the updates will be published on CERN neighbours site.

A picture speaks a thousand words and we all know it’s sometimes easier, and friendlier, to send an emoji thumbs up than just an ‘OK’. But what if you could use pictures to explain your job at CERN, or show the things you saw during a visit?

Well, now you can, as CERN has launched its own set of virtual stickers for use on iOS – a collection of 35 images portraying the Organization’s symbols and activities.

With their simple and user-friendly design, the CERN stickers are for everybody to use and enjoy, from people working at CERN to visitors and science enthusiasts.

The images include a collision event, a dipole magnet, the Globe of Science and Innovation, male and female scientists wearing CERN lanyards, and the colourful CERN safety helmets, known to every CERN visitor. These are just a few of the stickers already available, with more expected in the future.

“Our goal was to create an easily available and comprehensible way to showcase CERN activities, who we are and what we do here. We would like for people who love science to feel part of a global CERN community by using them,” explains Esma Mobs, the designer of the CERN stickers. 

The other purpose of the stickers is to introduce a new, less formal means of communication between people working at CERN. “For example, with the stickers of the three main restaurants on site, we now have a fast and visual way to ask somebody for lunch. There is also a sticker for the CERN community’s main fuel – coffee – which is even animated,” adds Esma.

If you are an Apple user, you can download your CERN stickers immediately from the App Store and use them on all your iOS devices. If you have any other kind of device, don’t worry – you can download the full set of stickers and attach them to your messages and e-mails. Soon enough there should also be a specially designed keyboard for Android devices.

Do you want to add your personal contribution to the collection of CERN stickers? You are welcome to send your image ideas to cern-stickers@cern.ch.

Who would ever think of spending a full Saturday indoors, coding for several hours, instead of enjoying a warm, sunny spring day? Highly motivated Django Girls participants!

But what is Django Girls? Django is a free and open source web application framework, written in Python programming language. The former helps its users to develop websites faster and easier. And since ICT is not a men’s world only, a community of women decided to empower and help women without IT experience participate in free programming workshops: Django Girls was born. The organisation is entirely volunteer-run.

The success is such that 379 events in 260 cities from 72 countries materialised since 2014, revealing the joys of coding to over 9000 women.

IdeaSquare welcomed its Run 2 of Django Girls Geneva after the great outcome last year. Set up by the CERN IT Department, Diversity and Local Engagement teams, the permanence of this fruitful activity is under consideration.

Twenty-three enthusiastic and beginner participants aged 15-39 were very well mentored, in small groups, by 8 dedicated tutors from CERN – all passionate people working in the ICT field. Some of the participants travelled from Bern and one of the programmer-to-be was so motivated that she even drove from Zurich to attend the workshop!

Everything was ready to start… And as soon as the participants were finally registered on the CERN network, the event could finally kick-off: how to create a blog application and deploy it to the internet.

The volunteers were dedicated and eager to help the attendees, who demonstrated continuous attention and willpower during the whole workshop. New friendships were built, exchanges were cheerful in a relaxed yet studious atmosphere. At the end of the day on Saturday, the new Django Girls had learnt the basics of computer programming and created their own website. A very productive and positive day indeed!

This year Django Girls was also set up as a satellite event of Girls in ICT International Day, an event organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Some participants from local schools will continue the journey and present there their achieved work during the programming workshop. And who knows, maybe their dawning passion?

We hope that this event motivated those women to enter the IT world and gave them the opportunity to consider it from a different perspective.

This would not have be possible without the help of the mentors, volunteers and organisers: a huge thank you to all of them!

“The Higgs boson does not exist!” stated an e-mail recently sent to many of our colleagues within CERN as well as with our global research community. We can definitely enter in a technical discussion about physic results produced by the LHC. But here, this is not the point. As many recipients noticed, this e-mail appeared as having been sent from an e-mail address “Fabiola.Gianotti [at] cern.ch”, i.e. the address of our Director General. However, no worries! The mail has not been sent by her. And her account has not been compromised. Rather, the issue lies in the technical ways the email protocol is working and – like in this case – can be abused…

Technically, e-mails are delivered like normal “snail mail” letters. In a normal letter, you can put whatever contents or opinion you want. Love letters, or threats. True statements, or fake news. And you can put any sender on its envelope, as well as any purported sending address --- not necessarily yours, but that of someone else, like that of our DG… Finally, but rather obvious, e-mails can be sent to any valid (and invalid) e-mail addresses. Due to our open and academic nature, CERN email addresses are published through the CERN phonebook and are available through many other webpages: conference participation lists, experiment memberships, service manager list, on-line/shifter duty lists...

Therefore, there is no good technical measure* to generally prevent such e-mails if sent from a fake (“spoofed”) e-mail address world-wide. Also, locally for the protection of CERN mailboxes, this is not as easy. While the SPAM filter tries to catch such fake emails, the attacker repeatedly made many modifications in order to bypass those filters (the attacker even expressed his frustration with our filtering when sending a few mails with the subject “[….] you Service Desk”). Thanks to our email service managers, they engaged in that mouse-and-cat game… Mostly with success, but sometimes with mails going through. Apologies for that.

*For the technical people: yes, “SPF” , “DMARC” and “DKIM” might theoretically help, but all those methods come with drawbacks resulting in delivery or compatibility problems, especially with standard mailing lists (see the experience made by Yahoo! in 2014). But that might get better in the future as e.g. mailing list software are trying to adapt (e.g. http://wiki.list.org/DEV/DMARC).

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

On Saturday, 11 March, a primary school named “ALICE” was inaugurated in the village of Prévessin-Moëns in neighbouring France. The name was chosen by the municipal council as a tribute to the ALICE experiment at CERN, “which is contributing to a better understanding of the origin of the universe”.

The aim of the council members was to introduce young children to the fascinating world of science and to familiarise them with the research carried out next door at CERN. Some of the installations of our Laboratory are indeed located within the commune of Prévessin-Moëns and many inhabitants of the village work at CERN.

The name also brings to mind the famous tale of Alice in Wonderland, a young girl driven by curiosity and a thirst for discovery. The choice of a female name was also relevant because it brings to the forefront the importance of nurturing girls’ interest in science and encouraging them to study its disciplines.

The event, which saw the participation of many pupils of the school accompanied by their parents, as well as other inhabitants of the village, was organised by scientists of the ALICE experiment and staff from CERN’s Education, Communications and Outreach group, who volunteered to offer play-and-learn workshops for children. Attendees even got the chance to peek at the real ALICE detector thanks to a live video link with the underground cavern.

This article is based on a longer piece in ALICE matters.

On Thursday, 13 April, the extended year-end technical stop (EYETS) was officially declared complete and the machine handed over from the team coordinating the technical stop to the Operations team.

However, before starting operations with beam, the hardware had to be re-commissioned. This operation included cooling down the sectors and performing the electrical quality assurance and powering tests.

To do that, all sectors have been progressively cooled down to their nominal operating temperature, 1.9 Kelvin, over the last few weeks, whereas they had been kept at about 20 K during most of the EYETS.

As soon as the sectors were at nominal operating conditions, the electrical quality assurance (ElQA) test could take place, to check the integrity of the electrical insulation of the magnets. This test concerned only the three main (13 kA) circuits for all sectors except for sector 1-2, where all circuits had to be qualified because a magnet has been replaced. It was right in this sector that a defective instrumentation cable for magnet protection was found in the warm part, possibly damaged during the heavy activities in this sector. The problem was fixed and this last sector finally released.

Once the ElQA test had been completed, the power converters and quench protection systems could be unlocked. The circuits were then ready to be powered.

The powering tests of the LHC superconducting circuits, taking place in the second half of April, are a big part of the re-commissioning, since almost 1600 circuits have to be switched on and tested in just few weeks.

These tests aim to verify the correct behavior of the protection functionality of each circuit and confirming the capacity of the magnets to reach the currents at which they will be operated along the year. This is a crucial phase in the preparation of the machine, as a protection failure could result in a catastrophic event; if a circuit fails to reach the desired current, it could limit the performance of the machine during the year. About 10 000 test steps are executed, powering circuits at currents rating from 60 A for the small orbit correctors to 13 kA for the 3-km-long dipole and quadrupole chains.

An incredible amount of work has been done in the last few years to continuously optimise the powering tests and to automate their execution and analysis. This effort has resulted in a reduction in the time needed to qualify the entire machine from several months down to few weeks. Nevertheless, a large number of tests have to be performed in less than three weeks and lots of information has to be processed and analysed by the experts. That’s why, for the execution of the tests, we rely strongly on several software applications and many equipment experts. After heavy software debugging, due to the numerous modifications done during the EYETS, the powering tests were able to start and are now progressing at a good pace: seven sectors have already been qualified and the tests in sector 1-2 (delayed due to the fault investigation) are at a good stage. All superconducting circuits will be ready before the end of the week and the machine check-out (the last phase of verification of all systems working together) will finalise the preparation for the beam.

After four months of frenetic work at every point of the machine, all activities are close to completion and the LHC is now getting ready for a new, long year of physics.

In Spring 2018, the first civil engineering work for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project will begin. Two new pits will be excavated near the ATLAS and CMS sites (LHC Points 1 and 5) giving access to new tunnels close to each of the experiments. Work on this scale requires meticulous preparation to avoid the slightest impact on the operation of the LHC. 

To assess the potential impact of this work having on the stability of the LHC tunnel and its equipment, which are extremely sensitive to vibrations, the mechanical measurement laboratory team of the EN-MME group has set up three seismic monitoring stations, two of them underground (at LHC Points 1 and 5) and one at ground level on the Prévessin site. "These stations enable us to monitor the earth’s vibrations practically in real time," explains Michael Guinchard, head of the mechanical measurement laboratory. "This will enable us to keep the LHC teams (BE-OP) as well as the teams responsible for the civil engineering work (SMB-SE) continuously informed so that corrective measures can be taken if the amplitude of the vibrations presents a risk for LHC operation. Once the LHC is operating at high luminosity, seismic monitoring will continue so as to keep risks for the equipment to a minimum, especially in the event of low-level seismic activity in the region or larger tremors coming from elsewhere."

The installation of three seismic monitoring stations at CERN is also of interest to the Geneva cantonal authorities, who have been looking to strengthen their seismic monitoring capabilities in the local region. The reason for this is that they have launched a programme called Geothermie 2020, aimed at developing the use of geothermal energy in the region. The techniques currently used in this field can generate micro-seismic events of 2 to 3 on the Richter scale, which calls for close seismic monitoring during the deep (1 km) boring phases. Switzerland’s national seismology service (Service Sismologique Suisse, or SED) therefore invited CERN to integrate its monitoring stations into the national network. "Being part of the SED network is a real boon for CERN," notes Michael Guinchard, "because it gives us access to data from across Switzerland and Europe, and improves our monitoring capabilities on all scales. Not to mention the expert assistance the SED can provide to us !"

One of the prerequisites for joining the SED was that CERN had to change the format of its seismic data. "To facilitate international collaboration, seismic data is exchanged across the world in the same format, known as Mini-Seed," Michael Guinchard explains. "Unfortunately, our seismic monitoring stations, which were chosen for their ability to withstand the accelerator environment, do not produce data in this format. So, in collaboration with our colleagues in the EN-STI group, we had to develop a system to convert our raw data into Mini-Seed data." The seismic data harvested by CERN will thus be available 24/7, notably on Timber but also across Europe on the seismic data exchange platforms.

In a paper published on 24 April 2017 in Nature Physics, the ALICE collaboration reports that proton collisions sometimes present similar patterns to those observed in collisions of heavy nuclei. This behaviour was spotted through observation of so-called strange hadrons in in certain proton collisions in which a large number of particles are created, using the 7 TeV proton collision data from LHC run 1.

Strange hadrons are well-known particles with names names such as Kaon, Lambda, Xi and Omega, all containing at least one strange quark. The observed ‘enhanced production of strange particles’ is a familiar feature of quark-gluon plasma, a very hot and dense state of matter that existed just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, and is commonly created in collisions of heavy nuclei. But it is the first time ever that such a phenomenon – the enhanced production of strange particles – is unambiguously observed in the rare proton collisions in which many particles are created. This result is likely to challenge existing theoretical models that do not predict an increase of strange particles in these events.

The study of the quark-gluon plasma provides a way to investigate the properties of strong interaction, one of the four known fundamental forces. The quark-gluon plasma is produced at very high temperature and energy density, when ordinary matter undergoes a transition to a phase in which quarks and gluons become ‘free’ and are thus no longer confined within hadrons. These conditions can be obtained at the Large Hadron Collider by colliding heavy nuclei at high energy.

Before this study, enhanced strangeness production has been observed only in collisions of heavy nuclei, and it is considered as a manifestation of quark-gluon plasma. ALICE’s result indicates that this phenomenon may now have been observed within proton-proton collisions as well.

The new results also show that the production rate of these strange hadrons increases with the ‘multiplicity’ – the number of particles produced in a given collision – faster than that of other particles generated in the same collision. In addition, data show that the higher the number of strange quarks contained in the induced hadron, the stronger is the increase of its production rate. No dependence on the collision energy or the mass of the generated particles is observed, demonstrating that the observed phenomenon is related to the strange quark content of the particles produced.

“We are very excited about this discovery,” said Federico Antinori, Spokesperson of the ALICE collaboration. “We are again learning a lot about this primordial state of matter. Being able to isolate the quark-gluon-plasma-like phenomena in a smaller and simpler system, such as the collision between two protons, opens up an entirely new dimension for the study of the properties of the fundamental state that our universe emerged from.”

A unique event called the CERN Roadshow in Finland took place on 6 April 2017. Organised by the Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP) and CERN, the Roadshow brought together members of the CERN and HIP managements alongside experts from CERN in the fields of procurement, knowledge transfer and human resources, at the Aalto University Design Factory in Otaniemi, Finland.

The Roadshow was targeted at potential CERN business and R&D&I partners, career service professionals and other Finnish stakeholders in CERN. Its main goal was to present to the local community the numerous business, educational, knowledge transfer, job and traineeship opportunities that CERN has to offer.

Finland has long traditions and established competences in natural sciences, high technology field research and the associated industrial activities. Finnish scientists, companies and students have been successfully working with CERN since the ratification of Finland’s membership in 1991. During the event, industrial companies such as Advacam, Lightneer, Luvata and Mirion Technologies presented their experience of doing business and co-innovating with CERN.

Charlotte Warakaulle, Director of International Relations at CERN, took part in one of the highlights of the event – the launch of Lightneer Ltd’s physics learning game.

The Roadshow was attended by representatives of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, the Academy of Finland, and the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. Fruitful meetings between 51 company executives from 42 high tech field companies, university career councillors and directors from 23 universities yielded many initiatives for future collaboration.

Encouraged by the positive feedback from the participants, the event organisers are already preparing for Finland@CERN, a similar meeting that will take place from 1 to 3 November 2017 at IdeaSquare and the Globe of Science and Innovation, as part of Finland’s centenary celebration year. 

A biennial African School of Physics (ASP) on fundamental physics and its applications was established in 2010 in order to promote international cooperation in the field of fundamental physics among African countries and between them and western countries.

An ASP has taken place every second year from 2010 to 2016, in South Africa, Ghana, Senegal and then Rwanda. The schools are based on a close interplay between theoretical, experimental and applied physics and grid computing. They cover a wide range of topics: from particle physics and particle detectors to astro-particle physics and cosmology and to computing and accelerator technologies. Scientists from Africa, Europe, Asia and the USA are invited to deliver lectures, taking into account the diverse levels and backgrounds of the students.

After each edition of the school, the ASP organising committee maintains contact with the students and mentors and coaches them as much as possible in their pursuit of higher education. In addition, the organising committee runs a mentorship program for active coaching of a few selected promising students.

Many ASP alumni are able to continue their studies at CERN, as summer school students, postgraduate students or post-doctoral fellows.

For example, Chilufya Mwewa, from Zambia, is a PhD student from the University of Cape Town. She attended ASP2010. “Intrigued by the many things I learned at this school, I considered pursuing a career in particle physics. I was able to work in collaboration with CERN scientists and thanks to the ASP network,” she says. She was awarded an ATLAS PhD grant and is currently working on the ATLAS Muon New Small Wheel and Standard Model physics at CERN.

Diallo Boye, from Senegal, attended ASP2012. He is student at the University of Johannesburg and he is now working as a PhD student on the ATLAS Muon New Small Wheel and on searches for Higgs decays to Beyond Standard Model particles. “Attending ASP basically initiated the start of my career in particle physics,” he happily notes.

Hyafa Sfar, from Tunisia, attended ASS2016 and she is now working at CMS as a PhD student. “ASP has given me a great opportunity to start up my PhD in the field of particle physics,” she remarks.

The fifth edition of ASP will take place in 2018 in Namibia, supported through a partnership with several Namibian and international institutes and organisations.

For more information, contact the ASP International Organising Committee at asp-ioc@cern.ch.

CERN found itself under heavy attack in summer 2015 with cybercriminals trying to take over PCs and computing accounts and aiming to extract some of our public documents. While the attack only lasted a few days and was visibly not successful in the end, it laid the foundation for an initiative to strengthen CERNs protective measures further.

CERN, with its open, academic culture, has always been susceptible to cyberattacks of many different kinds, as are all companies and institutes worldwide. Thanks to you being vigilant, attacks are usually fought off.  Training sessions and awareness-raising campaigns have shown to be fruitful on many occasions. Still, there is room for improvement (see our Bulletin article on “One click and BOOM… (Reloaded)”). Computer security is a moving target and defensive measures need continual adaptations and adjustments. The aforementioned attack in summer 2015 and the 2016 Crisis Management Exercise by CERN’s senior management triggered increased efforts to raise our defences. Thanks to the support of the CERN Management, four important security initiatives were launched:

* The mail service, in collaboration with the Computer Security team, has deployed a dedicated appliance that automatically analyses all our e-mails for malicious content (see also “Protect your click”). Our FireEye EX device even simulates user activity trying to trigger any malicious activity in the e-mails sent to us. It is now in full operation and many waves of malware such as the Dridex banking malware have been prevented from arriving in your inbox.

* For those mails that still make it through, the IT department’s Windows team has started deploying specially hardened Windows PCs for those colleagues who have to open unsolicited attachments regularly, in particular PDF files. If infected, those PDFs will certainly compromise the PC and the local computing accounts. Hardened Windows PCs are less susceptible to infection thanks to a suite of additional protective measures (e.g. administrator rights removed, an alternative PDF reader installed, phasing-out of Flash, execution restrictions for macros and local commands). A pilot is already running with our colleagues in the Finance and Human Resources sector. A big thank you to all participants!

* Thanks to a collaboration between the Accelerator and Technology sector and the IT department, additional access protections are on the horizon: multi-factor authentication (the use of a hardware token in addition to your password) is currently being investigated so that it can be deployed on dedicated Windows and Linux Bastion hosts (see also our article “Pimp up your password”). Those Bastion hosts (bastions indeed!) will become gateways for any interactive remote access into CERN’s accelerator network (i.e. the “Technical Network”) as well as for administrator access to CERN’s Data Centre.

* Finally, in line with a new strategy defined by the Beams department and the CNIC (Computing and Networking Infrastructure for Controls) working group, our colleagues from the OpenStack virtualisation service have started looking into ways to provide dedicated virtual machines for the control system development on the accelerator network. While those virtual machines are currently located on CERN’s office network, they should virtually move closer to the control system devices to ease development and testing.

Of course, we are trying to make all these extra measures as convenient and transparent as possible for you and your daily work. Still, we are counting on your support to ensure that CERN’s operations proceed in the most secure fashion.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

How is the humanitarian sector changing?”, “What are the emerging trends and technologies?” and “How can we prepare for the future?” are some of the questions raised at the first Humanitarian Foresight & Futures Co-creation (#HFFC17).

Over 65 participants from more than 25 international organisations, NGOs and permanent missions were hosted by IdeaSquare and welcomed by CERN’s Director for International Relations, Charlotte Warakaulle, at #HFFC17 on 4 April. They discussed and defined common thematic areas relating to the future of the humanitarian sector and how to prepare for it.

Designer and internet entrepreneur David Galbraith, CrowdAI scientist Sean Carroll, genomics futurist Juan Enriquez, human-centered innovator Tuuli Utriainen and organisational behavior lecturer Rich Cox gave their opinions on how data, new algorithms, the mobility of work, improved education and the re-shaping of challenges will change the future of the humanitarian sector.

“The inspiring atmosphere of IdeaSquare is ideal for fostering co-creation and the “dare to dream” for strategic humanitarian foresight,” said Olivier Delarue, CEO of the Global Humanitarian Lab (GHL).

In the afternoon session, co-creation led to the identification and visualisation of 31 leads for common activities in a “readiness and impact” map. Jean-Marie Le Goff, from CERN Collaboration Spotting, showed how automatic analysis of patents and publications can lead to information on academia and industry key players active around technologies interesting for the humanitarian sector.

A summary video of #HFFC17 can be found here.

If you have an idea on “How technology or methods used at CERN can improve the effectiveness and preparedness of the humanitarian sector” or are interested in participating in or contributing to the next edition, please contact us here.

The Czech Republic’s Academia Film Olomouc has decided to give its 2017 Award for Contribution to Science Communication to CERN, for its “long-lasting commitment not only to research in the edge of science but also to communication of its results and science in general to broader public”. The committee described CERN as a pioneer in developing new ways to communicate science via social media, film, traditional media and events such as CineGlobe. The award ceremony took place on 29 April 2017 at Palacký University Interactive Science Centre in Olomouc.

Ever since Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, physics and medicine have gone hand in hand, and advances made to particle detectors at CERN and elsewhere have continuously fuelled new developments in medical imaging.

The Medipix Collaborations, whose activities started in the 1990s developing a detector technology for the needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN, have commercialised Medipix in other scientific fields, in particular the medical imaging field.

Medipix works like a camera, counting and detecting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open. This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, noise-free images – all reasons that drove most of the LHC experiments to adopt the technology.

Through the Medipix Collaborations, a family of read-out chips for particle detection was developed, and to date there have been three generations of the Medipix chips – each with improvements and new features.

Among a wide range of other applications, Medipix can be used for Computed Tomography (CT) scans. During a CT scan, an X-ray tube is rotated around the patient, resulting in images showing both shape and density. In addition, unlike conventional X-ray images, overlapping structures are eliminated. There are many applications for this technique, but it is especially useful when searching for lesions, tumours and metastasis.

The third generation of read-out chips, named Medipix3, also allows ‘colour’ imaging during CT scans, or so-called spectral imaging. By sending X-rays of different energies through the object being examined, the Medipix3 chip can detect the photons one-by-one, categorising them according to their energy, thus providing information about the density and the atomic structure of a tissue. For example, while regular non-colour X-ray images from CT scans may show the difference between bones and soft tissue, spectral imaging is better able to distinguish between different materials of similar density. This aids medical staff with diagnosis, as materials that would previously appear the same in an image can now be classified.

At present, spectral imaging has several applications on the market, but it is still in the emerging phase and has not been widely adopted. The start-up company MARS Spectral Imaging is working on spectral molecular imaging technology based on Medipix3. When combined with biological tracers attached to metal nano-particles, their scanners can allow researchers and clinicians to measure biochemical and physiological processes, modelling human diseases in animals. Although still in a pre-clinical phase, meaning that the scanners cannot yet be routinely used on humans, the MARS team has concluded that the technology will be useful in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, stroke, arthritis, joint replacements and cancer.

In addition to pictures with new and improved diagnostic information, MARS promises that spectral imaging will enable faster and cheaper radiology procedures while working with significantly lower radiation doses. This will considerably broaden both the value and use of Computed Tomography (CT) as a diagnostic tool, and consequently the potential of spectral imaging technologies has received a lot of attention lately from medical professionals. It is still too early to say if Medipix and MARS will be dominant players in the field of spectral imaging, but they undoubtedly offer a promising solution in this emerging field.

Find out more at the next Knowledge Transfer seminar: “From High Energy Physics to a Bio-Medical Business”, by Anthony Butler, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) in MARS Spectral Imaginghere.

Forty years ago, on 7 May 1977, CERN inaugurated the world’s largest accelerator at the time – the Super Proton Synchrotron. The first beam of protons had already circulated around the seven kilometres of the accelerator in May of the previous year, and future research would include the Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of W and Z particles in 1983, when the machine was running as a proton-antiproton collider. The inauguration of the SPS gathered around 2000 people at CERN. A selection of brochures, press releases, photos, and audio-visual material available online in the CERN Document System helps to recreate the event.

But what was happening behind the scenes? Did you know that the organising secretary, Ella Steel, universally known as “Miss Steel”, set up a massive card index to keep track of the guests, entering all the details on 6000 colour-coded cards? She also insisted on sending reply cards to the VIPs, even though treating them like ordinary mortals was considered demeaning. “The higher you go in a hierarchy, the less legible signatures become,” she used to say, as she wanted to know who the replies came from. Logistics were further complicated by differing ideas in the different countries as to what constituted an “official delegate”.  

It’s all in her report, which is in the CERN Archive, along with another 1000 or so shelf metres of files filled with letters, notes, reports, rough drafts, memos and plenty more. Miss Steel’s “ant’s-eye view”, as she called it, is a trivial example, but the view behind the scenes is crucial. Without this, our understanding of past events is based solely on what was intended for public consumption, and history becomes just what was written by the winners.

Archival documents are a remarkable resource. They are the documentary by-product of human activity, the records generated by individuals and organisations over the ordinary course of their lives, and are an irreplaceable testimony to past events. For organisations such as CERN, archives provide a corporate memory that can be preserved while human memories fade. Not everything is kept, of course; in general, between 5 and 10% of the records produced by an organisation might be considered worth preserving for historical reasons.

Historic documents are precious, but they are also vulnerable. They are easily damaged or lost, and a scrawled note that changed the design concept for a project decades ago would make little sense removed from its context – the surrounding documents help us understand who wrote it, when and why.

Archives provide historical information to support ongoing activity, and the CERN Archive is consulted by researchers within and outside the organisation. Effective management of records and archives also underpins good governance, administrative transparency, the identity of individuals and communities, the preservation of mankind's collective memory, and access to information by citizens.

If you think there could be information in the CERN Archive that would be useful to you, if you know of material that you think should be preserved in the Archive, or if you are just curious to know more, take a look at our webpages or get in touch (anita.hollier@cern.ch). We’re always glad to help if we can.   

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is awake. On Saturday, 29 April, just after 8 p.m., it began circulating beams of protons for the first time in 2017, two days earlier than originally foreseen.

On the road to putting the LHC back into operation, during the last week of April, the powering test period gradually gave way to the machine check-out. This is the phase where all equipment is operationally available and all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place to complete the image.

One of the main steps of the machine check-out is the closure of the Beam Interlock System (BIS) loop, which requires all equipment to be in the operational state and the four experimental caverns to be patrolled and closed. Actually, everything must be set up as if the machine would be ready to receive beam. On Friday, 28 April, the machine and all its power converters were tested – cycled – from injection to acceleration, all the way to the flat-top and the squeeze phase, as if there was beam in the machine. After a few attempts and the resolution of some pending issues, the loop could finally be closed during the night of Friday, 28 to Saturday, 29 April, just before the long weekend. Many checks were made in parallel on all other systems required for beam operation.

In the meantime, the SPS crew worked hard to get the extraction of the single bunch beam from long straight sections 4 and 6 working for the commissioning with beam of the LHC. Initially the beam was sent successfully to the beam dumps close to the SPS, before going down though the TI2 and TI8 transfer lines to the LHC. By the end of the afternoon on Friday, the beam had been successfully sent down both transfer lines, knocking at the LHC’s door.

The first LHC beam injection was foreseen for Monday, 1 May. Given the impressive advancement that had been made prior to the long weekend, a first attempt was made to get everything ready on the morning of Saturday, 29 April to inject the beam. Unfortunately, a few issues were discovered at the last minute that delayed the injection. Thanks to the dedication of equipment specialists who worked over the long weekend, the issues were successfully solved in one day.

At 6 p.m., the first injection of beam 1 (clockwise direction) was started. The beam was then brought around the machine step-wise, going one sector further each time. Just 45 minutes later, the beam went all the way round and was circulating. Beam 2 (anti-clockwise direction) then went through the same process, and at 8.12 p.m., both beams were circulating, two days ahead of schedule.

Then, on the afternoon of Sunday, 30 April, the circulating single-bunch low-intensity beams were successfully accelerated up to 6.5 TeV per beam.

This remarkable achievement was made possible thanks to the good preparation of the machine and all its sub-systems by the equipment experts and the dedication of several experts in close collaboration with the operations teams in the CCC over the long holiday weekend.

Now the work continues with the detailed setting-up of the machine, initially with low-intensity single bunches and later with higher-intensity and then multiple bunches, to validate each step in the process, after which collisions can be made safely and physics can start in a few weeks’ time.

In a paper published on 1 May in Nature Physics, the CERN Axion Solar Telescope experiment (CAST) at CERN presented new results on the properties of axions – hypothetical particles that would interact very weakly with ordinary matter and therefore could explain the mysterious dark matter that appears to make up most of the matter in the universe.

Axions were postulated by theorists decades ago, initially to solve an important issue in the Standard Model of particle physics related to the differences between matter and antimatter – the so-called charge-parity violation – that are typical of processes regulated by the weak force, but that haven’t been detected in processes involving the strong force. The particle was named after a brand of washing detergent, since its existence would allow the theory to be “cleaned up”.

A variety of Earth- and space-based observatories are searching possible locations where axions could be produced, ranging from the inner Earth to the galactic centre and right back to the Big Bang.

CAST is looking for axions from the sun using a special telescope called a helioscope constructed from a test magnet originally built for the Large Hadron Collider. The 10-metre-long superconducting magnet acts like a viewing tube and is pointed directly at the sun: any solar axions entering the tube would be converted by its strong magnetic field into X-ray photons, which would be detected at either end of the magnet by specialised detectors. Since 2003, the CAST helioscope, mounted on a movable platform, has tracked the movement of the sun for an hour and a half at dawn and an hour and a half at dusk, over several months each year. The detector is aligned with the sun with a precision of about one hundredth of a degree.

In the paper published today, based on data recorded between 2012 and 2015, CAST finds no evidence for solar axions. This has allowed the collaboration to set the best limits to date on the strength of the coupling between axions and photons for all possible axion masses to which CAST is sensitive. “The limits concern a part of the axion parameter space that is still favoured by current theoretical predictions and is very difficult to explore experimentally,” explains the deputy spokesperson for CAST, Igor Garcia Irastorza. “For the first time, we have been able to set limits that are similar to the more restrictive constraints set by astrophysical observations,” he says.

Since 2015, CAST has broadened its research at the low-energy frontier to include searches for other weakly-interacting particles from the dark energy sector, such as “solar chameleons”. The experience gained by CAST over the past 15 years will also help physicists define the detection technologies suitable for a proposed, much larger, next-generation axion helioscope called IAXO.

“Even though we have not been able to observe the ubiquitous axion yet, CAST has surpassed even the sensitivity originally expected, thanks to CERN’s support and unrelenting work by CASTers,” says CAST spokesperson Konstantin Zioutas. “CAST’s results are still a point of reference in our field.”

More information on the results can be found in the scientific paper.

Mid-May has seen a big weekend for the cyber-threat landscape, as "WannaCry" (also known as "WannaCrypt") came onto the scene with a bang and affected many Microsoft Windows systems worldwide. Using an old exploit developed by the US National Security Agency and published by the ShadowBroker hacker group, WannaCry tried to infect non-patched PCs. As Microsoft has already provided fixes to this underlying vulnerability, this shows once more the importance of patching…

What if you haven’t patched? WannaCry installs ransomware (“Ransomware - when it is too late...”), i.e. software that encrypts a wide variety of files hosted on the computer, including MS Office documents, photos, films, etc. – hence the alias “WannaCrypt”. It also tries to identify external storage systems connected to the PC in order to encrypt those files, too. Unless you have a recent unaffected back-up, the only way to recover the files is to pay the ransom of 300 USD (see photo). Even if the ransom is paid, there is no guarantee that the attackers will provide the decryption details…

How can we fight WannaCry? Like any other malware, the primary infection vector is e-mail (also see our Bulletin article “One click and BOOM… (Reloaded)”). The motto “Stop - think - don’t click” therefore applies once more. Fortunately, this time, the CERN e-mail system and its anti-spam filtering identified and quarantined potentially malicious incoming e-mails. More importantly, all centrally managed Windows PCs were already patched against any exploitation of that kind. Microsoft made the corresponding updates available in March 2017 (i.e. MS17-010). The early bird catches the worm! So no harm was done to those computers. For non-centrally managed PCs, patching should be done regularly; a little effort today could save you tons of headaches in the future. Hence our recurring plea to you to keep your Windows, Linux or Mac computers, and also your Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, up-to-date using their auto-update features (see for example our Bulletin articles “Agility for computers” and “Android is the new Windows”). Windows Update, Mac’s Software Update and Linux’s YUM auto-update are an essential first line of defence of your computer. Running decent antivirus software adds to this: the native Windows Defender (and probably all major antivirus software) was able to detect WannaCry from the beginning. CERN’s anti-virus solution is available to you for free for download and use on your home computers. In fact, the few infected computers this time were sub-optimal private laptops owned by people temporarily visiting CERN. Too bad for them if they didn’t have reasonable recent back-ups of their local files... In the end, as luck would have it, it turned out that the creators of WannaCry had included a “kill switch” inside their code. The kill switch tests successful connection to a certain domain name on the Internet, and, if it exists, WannaCry will not execute. This kill switch was quickly identified by a security researcher, who then ensured that the domain name existed. Connections from inside the CERN network to that domain are redirected to a website maintained by the CERN Computer Security Team thus preventing the devices from being infected and giving us visibility into the affected systems.

For more on this subject, join us for the “Ransomware: Trick or Treat” seminar on Thursday, 1 June 2017 at 2 p.m. in the IT auditorium (31 3-004): https://indico.cern.ch/event/639653/

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

On 4 May, Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General, participated in a panel discussion called "Breaking the cliché - Women in science", which took place in Geneva. The event was co-organised by the International Gender Champions, the Mission permanente de la France auprès de l'ONU à Genève and the World Meteorological Organization.

The main goal of the event was to share experiences and discuss possible ways to increase the participation of women in all scientific fields.

Fabiola Gianotti shared how reading the biography of Marie Curie at the age of 17 contributed to inspiring her to study physics and then undertake a career in science. She emphasised the importance of diversity in general – not only in terms of gender, but also ethnicity, culture and traditions.

Diversity and equality have always been CERN’s strengths and they must be nurtured constantly. As the Director-General said in a recent article addressed to the CERN community: “It is incumbent on all of us to ensure that diversity is cherished as a fundamental value of this Organization, with zero tolerance for sexist, homophobic or racist behaviour.”

In the past 10 years, the percentage of female personnel at CERN has barely increased: women still only account for about 20% of the total. One of the reasons for this slow growth might be that, in general, girls and women are not encouraged to study or work in a technical field. Diversity is an important objective in our work community, so CERN has been trying to narrow this gender gap.

A couple of weeks after organising the Django Girls programming workshop at IdeaSquare, CERN participated in the annual Girls in ICT Day event held on 27 April at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva. These events, held simultaneously in several countries worldwide, aim to inspire young women and encourage them to follow a career in the field of information and communication technology (ICT).

This year, six motivated participants from the Django Girls workshop at CERN seized the chance to present their projects on website programming, which they started in IdeaSquare with the help of ICT experts. The girls were happy to explain their learning and creative process, and their projects got a remarkably good response from the audience.

The event kicked-off with an interactive opening ceremony, connected with Beirut and Vilnius via a live webcast, and with a live smartphone-based quiz – to the participants’ surprised delight.

Other schools presented projects varying from robotics to programming a satellite. In addition, ITU had organised relaxed small-group discussions between the attendees and an international group of female role models, where the professionals could answer questions and explain what motivated them to work in ICT.

All the incredibly talented girls who took part in the Girls in ICT Day confirmed what we already knew: girls and women in this field are much needed and should be taken seriously. With the amount of knowledge that was packed in one big room at the ITU headquarters, these girls could rule the world, no doubt!