Thanks to the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, people all over the world are now more connected than ever before. At the moment, you are most likely reading this article on your computer or smartphone. Also, social media could not exist without the World Wide Web.

Since the World Wide Web was invented here, CERN was invited to the Royaume du Web event at Palexpo, a festival that gathered 10 500 YouTube enthusiasts who came to meet some of the most famous French-speaking stars of the internet. Big names such as Norman, Dear Caroline and Le Grand JD (who came to visit CERN a couple of months ago) were present. You may not have heard of them, but they gather millions of viewers.

This edition was the first of its kind with stage performances, Q&A-sessions, word-battles and even yoga on stage. In addition, various stands invited participants to discover web culture.

CERN explained the origins of the Web and proposed virtual-reality tours of its Data Centre and a game of football with protons. Over 1000 people visited CERN’s stand. This was the first time that CERN has used VR videos at a public event and it truly was an innovative way to show places people can only rarely visit.

A group of 13 astronauts* from the European Space Agency (ESA) payed a visit to CERN on 12 May 2017.  

Invited by Professor Claude Nicollier and Professor Samuel Ting, the group enjoyed a guided tour around CERN. One of the key points they visited was the Data Centre, where Helen Sharman, Claude Nicollier and Samantha Cristoforetti took part in a live broadcast. During the interview the three astronauts shared what it is like to be in the International Space Station (ISS) and answered the audience’s questions left in the comment section.

Next, the astronauts visited the Payload Operations Control Centre (POCC) of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02). The AMS is a particle-physics detector assembled at CERN, that looks for dark matter, antimatter and missing matter from a module attached to the outside of the ISS.

On the same day the ISS had its milestone 200^th spacewalk, during which a new connector was installed on the AMS to prepare it for a new cooling system next year. Find out more about this operation here.  

* Reinhold Ewald, Ernst Messerschmid, Dumitru Prunariu, Samantha Cristoforetti, Michel Tognini, Franz Viehboeck, Claude Nicollier, Ulf Merbold, Andy Turnage, Helen Sharman, Klaus-Dietrich Flade, Alaksandar Aleksandrov and Bertalan Farkas

On Tuesday, 25 April 2017, CERN and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), signed a cooperation agreement to encourage collaboration on innovations in the aerospace field.

This formalises a long-term partnership in shared areas of interest, such as radiation measurements and their effects on electronic components, which are critical for both particle accelerators and space missions.

The agreement, which was signed by CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall and Frédérick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology at CERN, describes the wide range of planned collaborations. These will cover a huge range of technologies, from radiation studies, particle detector innovations and big data solutions, to miniature satellites, called cubesats.

“We are proud to have signed this framework agreement. It reflects our two agencies' complementary areas of interest. The RADECS 2017 international conference, which we are organising together in October in Geneva, will give us the opportunity to present the results of our collaboration,” they commented in a joint statement.

Three projects formalised in the agreement have already begun:

• Eyesat is a student nanosatellite developed by CNES for its Janus project – a hands-on higher education and outreach programme for space. Eyesat will be studying the phenomenon of zodiacal light in the Milky Way. Eyesat's radiation sensitivity will be tested in CHARM (CERN’s High-energy AcceleRator Mixed-field facility).
• NIMPH is another nanosatellite supported by CNES' Janus project, planned for launch in 2021. NIMPH is set to carry a CERN payload designed to measure the radiation environment in orbit, based on CERN’s RadMon technology.
• CERN and CNES will also investigate fibre optic radiation and temperature sensors developed at CERN for the LHC and their use in aerospace applications.

These projects, technically led by CERN Engineering Department, have benefited of support from the CERN Knowledge Transfer Fund. More collaborative projects in the pipeline could involve the use of CERN's particle detectors and optoelectronics technologies in space and the exchange of data analysis tools. Future CNES-CERN cooperation will mainly take the form of research and development collaborations, jointly coordinated by both institutes. CNES will also receive privileged access to CERN facilities, while CERN will in turn benefit from CNES validation of its facilities for space qualification tests.

Enrico Chesta, CERN's aerospace applications coordinator, and Julien Mekki, CNES radiation expert, highlighted that valuable knowledge transfers between CERN and CNES have already taken place through the exchange of personnel, and stressed the symbolic importance of the event: “This is both an important achievement and a starting point paving the way to many useful future joint initiatives.”

The synergies and competencies in each of the organisations' respective domains of excellence will be particularly important for sharing resources.

Recently, CERN has been developing a network of institutional partnership with space agencies, industry, universities and international organisations active in the aerospace field. CERN is also organising, with CNES involvement, the RADECS conference (Radiation Effects on Components and Systems), which will be held in October 2017 in Geneva. This annual event brings together the world's scientific community working on the effects of radiation on electronic components and systems, an area of study that has a major bearing on both the success of space missions and the reliability of accelerators.

The first collisions with stable beams were delivered to the LHC experiments today, with three bunches circulating in each beam. This marks the start of the physics run and the end of the first phase of LHC commissioning with beams, which started 3 weeks ago.

The LHC began running with beam for the first time in 2017 in the evening of Saturday, 29 April. For just over two hours, beams were circulating in both rings, kicking off various beam commissioning activities ahead of the upcoming run of the LHC.

From the moment of first beam, the various teams of the Accelerator and Technology Sector have been alternating day and night, seven days a week, to bring the LHC to the state where stable colliding beams can be delivered to the experiments for data-taking.

To give the teams involved in those activities time to rest and analyse the results, a few commissioning threads are being pushed ahead in parallel.

The first consists of preparing the LHC machine cycle from injection to collisions at 6.5 TeV. This activity is performed with so-called probe bunches of sufficiently low intensity that they pose no or very little risk to the machine equipment while new territory is being explored. Roughly 24 hours after first circulating the beams, one probe bunch per beam was successfully accelerated to 6.5 TeV.

A day later, on 1 May, the optics ‘squeeze’, an operation where the beam size is reduced at the collision points, was probed for the first time at 6.5 TeV. Over several cycles, the beam parameters and the beam optics are adjusted iteratively until they closely match the targets. Since the LHC is a very reproducible machine, this process is accelerated by reusing corrections established in previous years.

As one of the last steps, the beams are collided by switching off the magnets that keep them separated during injection, energy ramp and optics squeeze. Because the beams are very small compared to the alignment accuracies, the operation crews must ‘find’ the collisions by scanning the beams against one another until collisions are observed in the detectors.

In parallel to the cycle commissioning, more intense bunches are circulated at injection to setup the beam instrumentation, fine adjust beam steering and feedback systems that stabilise the beams in the vacuum chamber. The systems that protect against equipment failure and beam losses are tested at injection by provoking failures and verifying the correct reaction of the systems.

When bunches with nominal intensity, containing around 100 billion protons, can be circulated in good conditions and the cycle setup is finalised at injection and at 6.5 TeV, it is time to precisely align over 100 collimators and protection devices around the beam orbits.

In 2017, the primary collimator jaws that are closest to the beam will be only 1 mm away from the beam core. Orbit feedback and collimator movement systems must ensure that the distance between the beams and the jaws is stable to just tens of micrometres whenever the beams circulate in the two vacuum chambers. As a final validation of the collimation setup, probe bunches are deliberately shaken until they touch the collimators, while particle losses are recorded around the ring to verify that the collimation system intercepts more than 99.9% of the escaping particles.

After the start of the physics run, in the following days, the operators will interleave periods of fine adjustments and stable beams. They will also start the intensity ramp-up, accelerating the first trains of 12 bunches of protons per beam, foreseen by the end of this week.

9 May is traditionally Europe Day and it is no coincidence that this date was chosen for the official opening of Linac 4, the first inauguration of a new accelerator at CERN since the LHC started up in 2008. Linac 4 was supported by a research and development programme within the framework of the European CARE (Coordinated Accelerator Research in Europe) project, as well as by special contributions from the European Commission and several European countries.

Linac 4 has been operational since it successfully completed acceleration tests at its nominal energy of 160 MeV at the end of 2016. It will be connected to the rest of the accelerator complex during Long Shutdown 2 in 2019-2020 and will then become the first link in CERN's accelerator chain, replacing Linac 2, which has been in service since 1978. "The acceleration tests at 160 MeV were very encouraging and we are relieved to know that, if we encounter a problem with Linac 2 before the end of 2018, Linac 4 can take over," says Frédérick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology at CERN. "The next two years will be important for us to reach beams of an intensity compatible with the requirements of the other accelerators and particularly to reach more than 95% availability for Linac 4, which is an essential level for the first link in the chain." The 86-metre-long accelerator will undergo various reliability tests over the coming months. The teams will then concentrate on connecting it to the PS Booster.

The inauguration provided a good opportunity to reflect on the accelerator's history. Maurizio Vretenar, who led the project until the start of this year, revisited the human and technical feats leading to the birth of the new accelerator: after a gestation period of 20 years. "Roland Garoby and I wrote the first article mentioning the construction of a new linear accelerator in 1996," recalled Vretenar. "It was clear at the start of the 1990s that the LHC injectors would one day reach their limits and we would have to think about replacing or upgrading them.”

At the time, the proposed machine was intended to accelerate protons up to 2 GeV and most of its sections would have been superconducting. The concept evolved, the energy level was reduced and the superconducting option was dropped. "But in science, ideas don't die, they float around and sometimes appear in a different form," continued Vretenar. The ESS (European Spallation Source), which is under construction in Sweden, is making use of the principles behind the superconducting option and of many of Linac 4's other components for low-energy acceleration. In 2007, the current design for Linac 4 was adopted, whereby the machine would accelerate H^- ions to an energy of 160 MeV thanks to a chain comprising four different types of accelerating structure.

Nonetheless, there were still some mountains to move. Starting with Mont Citron, the rather hyperbolic name given to the hillock near to the PS that needed to be flattened to allow the construction of the building for the new accelerator. "And it had been 20 years since a proton linear accelerator had been constructed anywhere in Europe," recalled Vretenar. "The know-how was starting to fade and we needed to build an innovative 21st-century machine that would also be reliable." Linac 4 incorporates several innovations, such as its ion source, its two high-energy accelerating structures (CCDTL and PIMS), which are being used in an accelerator for the first time, and its focusing system, which uses 126 permanent magnets. "We have contributed to rebuilding the skills needed for linear accelerators in Europe," adds Vretenar.

But Linac 4 reaches beyond the borders of Europe. As well as contributions from Poland, France, Spain and Italy, the accelerator's design and construction benefitted from the participation of Russia, India and Pakistan.

Maurizio Vretenar concluded by warmly thanking Alessandra Lombardi, his deputy throughout the project, who has now taken the baton and will be in charge of the test and connection phases. He also praised the CERN personnel who developed and constructed the accelerator: "CERN personnel are devoted and motivated. Throughout all these years it has always been a pleasure to work with you."

Linac 4 in figures

• 86 metres long, of which 76 metres are for acceleration
• 120 km of cables
• 173 quadrupole magnets (including 126 permanent magnets)
• 27 RF cavities
• 17 klystrons (of which 9 come from LEP) for RF power

Did you know?

• Mont-Citron (40 000 cubic metres) was rebuilt on CERN property on the French side of the border
• The CCDTL-type accelerating structures clocked up a total of 12 440 kilometres travelling from CERN to the Urals and Siberia and back again
• 102 tonnes of steel and copper were used for the accelerating structures
• The H^- ions begin their journey in a simple bottle of hydrogen

A brand new piece of technology called SuShi, a Superconducting Shield septum magnet, is being developed for CERN’s Future Circular Collider study, to protect the future machine from the beam’s anticipated extremely high energy.

To ensure the continuity of CERN's diverse scientific programme, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study was launched in 2014 to explore scenarios for post-LHC circular colliders. The unprecedented size of this future machine creates exciting technological challenges, as it requires as-yet-unimagined concepts for many of its key subsystems. The huge amount of energy stored in the circulating beams is expected to be around 8.4 GJ – equivalent to the energy of 24 TGV trains, running at a speed of 150 km/h. Since the energy is so high, a completely new extraction system will be crucial for machine protection, as the beam must be safely disposed of in the event of a failure or at the end of an experimental cycle.

The extracted beam is kicked into the high-field region of the septum magnet by a fast-pulsed kicker magnet to receive the final, and significant, deflection towards an external beam dump. At the same time this magnet must produce a very low field in the circulating beam. The transition between the two regions of the septum magnet must be as sharp as possible to reduce the required strength of the upstream kicker system.

The new solution is based on the concept that a passive superconducting shield can create a zero-field region inside a strong external magnetic field by inducing persistent eddy currents on its surface, automatically arranged in such a way as to fully cancel out the field in its interior.

A collaboration between CERN and the Wigner Institute for Physics (Budapest, Hungary) was established, under the framework of the FCC Study, to evaluate the feasibility of a new concept for this part of the machine, and to propose realistic materials and technologies.

Three possible candidates have been selected for the first tests: a bulk MgB₂ tube, a multilayer, helically wrapped, high-temperature superconductor tape on a copper tube, and a sheet made up of layers of niobium titanium, niobium and copper. The first prototype was successfully tested in February 2017 at CERN's SM18 facility, and could shield 2.6 T at its surface with a wall thickness of 8.5 mm. This is already around 2.5 times more efficient than the Lambertson septum magnets used in the LHC.

Tests for the two other prototypes are planned for later this year. Once the performance of all three prototypes has been evaluated, the best candidate will be chosen for more sophisticated tests and further prototyping.

For more information, visit the project website: http://cern.ch/sushi-septum-project.

Well-tested code is the cornerstone of a reliable and robust software stack: nothing is more annoying than a crashing, failing or misbehaving application, the loss of time and service(!) as a result of this, and the cumbersome debugging process to find the origin of the flaw. Not to mention the frustration of the user community. Although the production of bug-free code is impossible due to the complexities of software and the limited skills of most human programmers, reducing the number of bugs and flaws early in the development process significantly lowers debugging costs later. For the sake of software quality, the IT department provides you and your clients with a few simple tools to save precious time and cerebral pain.

Writing perfect code is far from easy and requires a deep knowledge of the programming language(s) being used, plus lots of experience. The introduction of flaws and bugs is inevitable, it happens and will continue to happen to even the most skilled coders among us. But these skilled coders – the Gandalfs of coding – know how to turn the odds in their favour. They follow common best practices on modularity, isolation, simplicity and readability; they validate every bit of input data and discard unreasonable input; they limit the execution scope and reduce the necessary privileges; they choose safe defaults; they know how to keep secrets secret; and they pay attention to compiler messages (e.g. gcc –wALL anyone?) as, very often, compiler warnings flag code that is in a suboptimal state. Ideally, code should compile without any complaints at all. 

Want to become a software magician yourself? Easy, if you apply the best practices mentioned above. Even easier if you use CERN’s Gitlab instance as your primary software repository. Its Continuous Integration framework, Gitlab-CI, lets you introduce additional, automatic static code analyses, running on top of your code repository in a very simple way, to ensure that your code is clean of known security issues and bad practices. This is especially efficient when working in groups or teams, because it allows you to focus more on your task, rather than on which tools everyone should use and how. Since you will not need to prepare your testing environment for every change, you will save a lot of time. 

All these static code analysis tools are also available for download. If you are interested in finding out how to better secure your website – in particular if it is directly exposed to the Internet – see our recommendations and our tools for Oracle/APEX. Remember that one of the basics is simple: consider using CERN IT’s central web service!

And of course there are many other opportunities to improve your software. The Computer Security team, in collaboration with CERN’s Technical Training team, has arranged several different “Secure Coding” courses on web development and good programming practices. For those who want to learn “hacking”, we provide regular hands-on capture-the-flag courses where you can learn to become a penetration tester. Join our WhiteHat Challenge in September 2017! And if you prefer a book, here is a list of further reading on the subject.

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.

The ARIES project officially began on 1 May 2017 and activities were launched with a kick-off meeting hosted at CERN on 4 and 5 May. ARIES, which stands for “Accelerator Research and Innovation for European Science and Society”, is a Horizon 2020 Integrating Activity, co-funded by the European Commission with a contribution of €10 million.

ARIES will last for four years and aims to promote particle accelerator R&D, developing European accelerator infrastructures and facilitating the discoveries of tomorrow. The consortium brings together 41 participants from 18 different European countries, including accelerator laboratories, technology institutes, universities and industry.

The project fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between academia and industry to share technology and information for excellent accelerator science. In addition, it will provide enhanced access to accelerator infrastructures, strengthen innovation and ensure long-term sustainability in the accelerator field.

ARIES will develop new technologies to ensure future accelerators are more affordable, reliable, sustainable and better performing. Considerations include energy efficiency, new accelerator concepts, new high-temperature superconductors, new superconducting coatings and new materials for thermal management.

Fourteen different European test facilities will be made available under ARIES for magnet, material, electron and proton beam, radio frequency and plasma acceleration testing.

In an effort to promote innovation and accelerator applications, ARIES includes co-innovation actions with industry, such as the “Proof-of-Concept” programme, which offers funds to develop accelerator spin-off technologies in partnership with industry.

Finally, ARIES will create a training programme to secure the sustainability of accelerator research, ensuring the next generation of scientists and engineers are equipped with the best tools for the future of accelerator science.

ARIES Project Coordinator, Maurizio Vretenar (CERN), said: “Accelerators are at a critical transition moment, with new concepts, technologies and applications emerging all the time. ARIES will develop new technologies for a variety of projects and accelerator types, and promote innovation in the field with new ideas, synergies, applications and ways of working together.”

According to the official LHC schedule first stable beams were scheduled for 12 June, following a 5-week beam recommissioning period and a 7-day scrubbing run.

The excellent availability of the LHC and its injector chain, together with the dedication of the many specialists made it possible to be much ahead of this schedule, as first stable beams could already be declared on Tuesday, 23 May, only 25 days after the first beam was injected. From that moment onwards the remaining commissioning activities were interleaved with longer stable beam periods for physics.

This also triggered the so-called intensity ramp-up period during which a well-defined scheme of increases in the number of bunches and thus beam intensity is rolled out and formal checks for each intensity step are made until 2556 bunches per beam are reached, which is the objective for 2017. This scheme starts with 3 bunches per beam and then goes up to 12, 72, 300, 600, 900, 1200, 1800, 2400 and ends with 2556 bunches per beam. For each step the requirement is a minimum of 20 hours of stable beam in total, but also that the machine is filled three times. The goal of this controlled and step-wise intensity increase is to ensure that all systems work well with many bunches and a high total beam intensity.

Like every year, but even more importantly this year because of the magnet exchange in sector 1-2, there is also a scrubbing run, which aims at conditioning the vacuum chamber in order to reduce the so-called Secondary Electron Yield (SEY) emission, that is the number of secondary electrons produced on average per incident electron on the inner walls of the vacuum chamber. Reducing the SEY lessens or avoids the build-up of electron clouds in the vacuum chamber that can lead to beam instabilities and an increase in the demand for cryogenic cooling power. In an unconditioned machine the electron cloud build-up becomes more important when the bunch trains get longer and reduces when the bunch trains are further apart along the circumference of the machine. Therefore, the scrubbing run initially starts with bunch trains of 72 bunches well-spaced. Once the scrubbing shows its effect (reduced SEY measured by the reduction in heat load on the cryogenics system) the spacing between the bunch trains is reduced.

Since the intensity ramp up was well-advanced and longer bunch trains were required, 24 hours of the planned 7-days scrubbing run were advanced by one week to Monday, 29 May with the aim to perform an initial conditioning and allow the injection of longer bunch trains in the process of the intensity ramp-up.

At present, the remaining 6-day long scrubbing run is in full swing and the LHC is being prepared to receive the full number of 2556 bunches per ring with 144 bunches per injection from the injector chain. 

With over 60 years of history and currently more than 13,000 users from all over the world, CERN clearly has great potential to bring together a varied alumni community. Today, CERN alumni are distributed around the world, pursuing their careers and passions across many fields including industry, economics, information technology, medicine and finance. Several have gone on to launch successful start-ups, some of them directly applying CERN-inspired technologies.

Setting up and nurturing this important network is a strategic objective for CERN management. Following 12 months of careful preparation, the new CERN Alumni Programme will be launched this week.

The new community, united by a shared pride in having contributed to CERN’s scientific endeavours, will provide an opportunity for alumni to maintain links with the Organization. It will allow them to continue to share CERN’s values and support its activities, and serve as a valuable resource for members of personnel in the transition to work outside the laboratory. Physicists, in particular, often consider CERN as a “prime environment” that comes just after academia. The prospect of having to leave CERN may be daunting, with no guarantee that one’s professional future will offer a similar environment and possibilities. However, preliminary statistics on the CERN alumni community demonstrate that professional experience at CERN nurtures skills and talents that are highly sought after by employers and can aid the development of alumni careers in many different fields.

We are aware that it will be a challenge to reach all of our alumni spread across the planet. If you are one of them, do not hesitate to leave your contact details at https://alumni.cern/. It is the best way to show your interest, join the new community and stay connected with CERN. We also invite you to get in touch with any questions by emailing alumni.relations@cern.ch. We will be very happy to welcome you back to CERN again!

This text is part of a Viewpoint originally published in the May 2017 issue of the CERN Courier.

Ever since its foundation, CERN has been constantly developing new technologies and putting existing ones to new use. The scientific heritage of the Organization is embodied not only in its scientific works, but also in its scientific instruments and other objects. In its 63-year-long history, many artefacts have been kept and still remain today to tell their story and to inspire current and future generations.

Around 200 pieces of unique historic importance form CERN’s scientific heritage object collection. It is being run by the Exhibitions and global engagement section of the Education, communications and outreach group, which provides appropriate storage and protection of the pieces and administers loans under guidance from the scientific information policy board (SIPB). A special database has also been created in CDS, with a complete description of the collection.

“In addition to their historical significance, objects of scientific heritage are increasingly valued as a means of disseminating CERN’s research to a wider audience. For a long time now our collection has been popularising CERN’s activities and achievements,” says Afroditi Anastasaki, currently working on a project to make a complete overview of the database.

Indeed, the collection has a worldwide impact. Recently 15 objects were borrowed by the award-winning Collider exhibition of the Science Museum in London, which went on an international tour across Europe, Asia and Australia.

Not only museums, but also user institutes of the CERN experiments often borrow objects to present the Laboratory’s work to the public. In March 2017 the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, organised an exhibition to celebrate its 100^th year anniversary.

Recently the exhibitions section initiated a project aiming to collect new objects, especially ones related to the LHC or belonging to the four large experiments – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

“There are certain inclusion criteria. The object has to be created at CERN, for a CERN experiment, machine or accelerator, it has to tell an interesting story. It also has to be in good condition. Not all objects belong to CERN. We have pieces from ATLAS for example, which are owned by institutes participating in the collaboration. We only store them and take care of them. There is a strict procedure of arranging a loan to a museum and we always ask the owner for permission first,” explains Afroditi.

In order for an object to be able to delight and fascinate, it has to tell a good story. Unfortunately, the tales of some pieces have faded through the years and still remain unidentified. A list of these “mystery” objects can be found here.

If you have an object which can be included in the heritage collection, if you want to add details to any object’s description or if you were able to identify a mystery object, contact Afroditi Anastasaki. Help us tell CERN’s story even better!

International Archives Day, 9 June, is an opportunity to discover a little-known CERN resource. Unlike libraries, archives tend to be hidden away. You can’t browse among the shelves, or borrow files to use in the workplace, but sometimes they contain just the information you need.

CERN’s rich heritage has many parts: its scientific data, the black and white photos recently put online by the Library, the audio-visual collection, currently being digitized by the IT department, historic objects in the care of the IR-ECO group, and much more - not least the memory of its people.

The CERN Archive exists in the background, supporting other endeavours and preserving our documentary heritage for future generations. About 1000 shelf metres of files filled with letters, notes, reports, rough drafts, memos such as this report, by Miss Steel,  are preserved. You can browse more examples on our timeline.

It is a place for information on all aspects of CERN’s history. Sometimes documents provide detailed information, such as measurements that facilitate maintenance of old infrastructure. Sometimes they clarify a policy decision taken several decades ago, or allow old research to be reused in new ways. Sometimes they enrich our understanding of other historical resources. Guido Franco’s 1968 film about CERN  is great fun to watch, but 50 years later it’s even more interesting to read about the controversy that his approach stirred up. Some people were enthusiastic, saying he’d captured the spirit of particle physics research, others thought his frivolous portrayal of scientists would ruin CERN’s reputation.

Archives contain records written during the ordinary course of business, so they tend to give a very honest view of what was going on. That doesn’t mean every document tells the truth. To understand fully you need to read documents in context and consider the creators’ intentions. That’s why archival management is governed by respect for the integrity, provenance and original order of the material. Rearranging files in a more user-friendly way would destroy much of the contextual information, and unsupervised access would compromise their evidential value.       

CERN also owns the scientific archive of 1945 Nobel-prizewinning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. This small but historically valuable collection was donated by Pauli’s widow who, with the help of friends, tracked down originals or copies of his letters. His correspondence, with Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and others, provides an invaluable resource on the development of 20^th century science. What would have happened if Pauli’s letters had been e-mails?

Most items in the Pauli collection have been digitized and are available online. The Archive also includes photographs, manuscripts, notes, and a rare audio recording of Pauli lecturing in 1958.

If you wish to explore CERN’s collections:
- Pauli Archive http://library.cern/archives/Pauli_archive
- CERN Archive http://library.cern/archives : Most scientific and technical material is available for consultation, but restricted access (30 year closure) applies to other types of files.
- Various online resources are available here, plus more information about the history of CERN.

Contact for any enquiries: Anita.Hollier@cern.ch

Is there still a glass ceiling for women in science in 2017? At 8.30 p.m. on 29 June, CERN will welcome physicist Hélène Langevin-Joliot for a lecture at the Globe of Science and Innovation. Now the Emeritus Research Director in Fundamental Nuclear Physics at the CNRS in Orsay (France), she has witnessed the progress of women scientists throughout her long and very productive career.

From an eminent family of scientists (no less than four Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics), and herself passionate about physics, she will talk about her career as a woman in a traditionally male-oriented profession. Langevin-Joliot, daughter of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie and granddaughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, grew up in an extraordinary and intellectually stimulating environment.

To say that the Curie women were feminists would be an understatement. Her mother and grandmother, both pioneers in their fields, supported her ambitions from a very early age and encouraged her to fight for important causes, such as helping women to access scientific careers and increasing scientific literacy among the general public.

Hélène Langevin-Joliot lifts the veil a little ahead of her lecture:

What are you expecting from your visit to CERN?
I haven’t been to CERN for a long time. I’m expecting that this visit and the meetings I will have while I am here will provide me with an opportunity to enrich my scientific and cultural knowledge. I’m also looking forward to seeing how CERN is developing its initiatives to inform the general public about science.

When you were young, did you rebel against the pressure of your historically famous family?
I wasn’t tempted to rebel as a child or a teenager, and not even as a young woman after the war. The pressure wasn’t as great as you might think: the media scrutiny that exists today didn’t exist or at least wasn’t as extensive and was very rarely focused on science and scientists. With the approach of war, followed by the occupation and then the liberation, people had enough to think about.

Why did you choose physics? Was it your first choice?
At school, I was only really passionate about solving maths problems. I found physics boring, too much about applying rules. But my mother got hold of some “experimental” equipment for me and that was how I began to enjoy doing a bit of physics and chemistry, and chose to focus on those subjects.

From your point of view, how have women made progress in science since the beginning of your career?
After the war, when I started at the CNRS, the laboratories had to be built up from scratch. We had a huge amount of catching up to do in nuclear physics and those involved “already” included about 25% women, which was a lot at the time. Later on, I was struck by the virtual absence of women at international colloquia, except for those from some Latin or Scandinavian countries. In France, the disparities between the different disciplines became clear to me, as well as the effects of the glass ceiling. Then the issue of gender equality took on a new significance, with new generations of women becoming more conscious of discrimination.

The lecture will be held at 8.30 p.m. on 29 June at the Globe of Science and Innovation (Meyrin). The lecture will be in French with simultaneous interpreting into English. Entry is free of charge but registration is mandatory. The event is being organised by the Visits and Local Relations team from the Education, Communication and Outreach group, in collaboration with the Écho du Reculet de Thoiry newspaper.

CERN is rebuilding its digital portfolio (a.k.a. the home.cern website, and all websites that use the CERN theme).

The web team will be blogging regularly about the decisions they’ve made to explain how and why they’ve made them on the Change blog.

So far, the blog discusses the research done on CERN’s audience and users i.e. who uses the website, and what they want to see. The web team welcomes your comments and feedback so please go, have a read, and comment.

At the moment the project is still conducting research on the navigation and whether we’ve put information in the right places, and you can help by filling out this survey. 

This week, great manoeuvres have been undertaken by two neutrino detectors (temporarily) at CERN. While ICARUS started its voyage to reach its new home at Fermilab in the US, Baby MIND, a 75-tonne neutrino detector with a new magnetization scheme, was moved from the Large Magnets Facility building, where it was built, to the East Hall (Building 157), where it will be characterised in the Proton Synchrotron (PS) beam in the next few weeks.

Baby MIND is a prototype for a Magnetised Iron Neutrino Detector (MIND) whose goal is to precisely identify and track positively or negatively charged muons, in order to reconstruct the parent neutrinos that produced them interacting with matter. The more detailed is the identification of the muon that crosses the detector, the more we can learn about the original neutrino. After its testing and characterisation in the PS beam, it will be transported at the end of July to Japan, where it will be part of the the (T59) WAGASCI experiment, contributing to a better understanding of the T2Kneutrino oscillation experiment.

From 16 to 18 June, a group of 15 physics teachers from Sweden came to CERN for a series of lectures and visits. The training programme for Swedish teachers began in 1993 on the initiative of Richard Jacobsson, who at the time was a physicist with the DELPHI experiment at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. The programme is organised by the IECD (International Education and Development Centre - Kurscentrum Umeå/Uppsala). Richard Jacobsson, who is today jointly responsible for the proposed SHiP experiment, is still the main organiser at CERN. Over the past 25 years, more than 470 Swedish teachers have benefited from these annual three-day courses.

Despite the ultra-high vacuum of the LHC beam pipe, residual gas molecules and electrons remain trapped on the walls of the vacuum chamber. When the beam circulates, they are liberated from the surface of the walls and they eventually destabilise the beams. This phenomenon is called “electron cloud”.

The LHC beam-time of week 23 was fully devoted to the “scrubbing” of the vacuum chamber walls to prevent the formation of electron clouds. In this mode of operation, the LHC is repeatedly filled with as many closely spaced bunches as possible, which are able to provoke intense electron clouds in the pipes. In a beneficial loop, when the pipe walls are under a strong electron bombardment, they gradually become less prone to produce further electrons and this, in turn, inhibits the electron cloud formation. In this way, the scrubbing operation reduces formation of electron clouds, which would otherwise heat up the walls, degrade the vacuum in the beam pipes and eventually generate instabilities or degradation of colliding beams.

Scrubbing the LHC this year was deemed even more necessary because of the opening of Sector 1–2 during the Extended Year End Technical Stop (EYETS) 2016–17 and the consequent contamination of the pipe inner walls.

The LHC scrubbing began on Tuesday, 6 June. Long trains of 288 bunches from the SPS were used to fill the LHC. The cells of Sector 1–2 exhibited, as expected, a far larger heat load at the beginning with respect to those of all the other sectors. Over the following days, however, the heat load in Sector 1–2 gradually decreased and the beam quality was seen to be steadily improving, demonstrating that the scrubbing of the beam chambers was being successful.

By Friday night, the number of bunches in the LHC reached 2820 per beam, which is the maximum number that can be presently achieved. The injection process was quite fast thanks to both the injection of long trains from the SPS and to the LHC cryogenic control system, which could efficiently react to the rapidly changing heat loads on the cold walls while more and more beam got injected. In spite of the continued presence of a dense electron cloud in the machine, the full beam was circulating stably and with little degradation in LHC by Saturday night, while the heat load in Sector 1–2 went down to the value it had reached at the end of 2016.

The final day of this year scrubbing run was devoted to dedicated beam tests aiming to address long-standing questions, as well as (yet) unexplored operational aspects, such as the difference in electron cloud production between the two beams and the machine settings necessary to guarantee beam stability with the current amount of electron cloud in the machine. All tests were successfully completed as of Monday, 12 June, early in the morning. The LHC is now ready to continue the intensity ramp-up with 25-nanosecond beams for physics, which will eventually lead to 2556 high-brightness bunches per beam stored in the machine, which is the objective for 2017.

Lots of organisations communicate. But not all organisations communicate strategically –purposefully sharing information to the right people, at the right time, and engaging people in their activities.

Strategic communications are crucial if CERN wants to achieve its scientific goals and be a leading, trusted, voice for research around the globe. CERN leadership has, for well over a decade, understood the value of strategic communications. As such, the Education, Communication and Outreach group (ECO) are excited to share CERN’s new strategy for communications, which covers the next four years – the mandate of the current Directorate.

The strategy is available online, and draws together contributions from across CERN. It includes six key messages that we hope will encourage engagement with CERN, emphasise our mission, and highlight the themes that underpin our identity:

• CERN is a world leader in particle physics;
• The discovery of the Higgs boson has launched a journey of discovery that will extend for decades
• We need new accelerators, detectors and computing power for that journey;
• CERN brings benefits to society;
• We are an open institution;
• Peaceful collaboration and diversity are intrinsic to CERN.

The purpose of communication is rarely simply to inform; rather the ultimate goal is to impart knowledge, change behaviours or attitudes. Thus, our communication goal is, on one hand, to ensure the long-term future of CERN’s mission to be the European particle physics laboratory and, on the other, to engage society in CERN’s activities.

There are several audiences that we need to engage, from governments and the international scientific community, to industry and the CERN community. Teachers, students and our neighbours are also key audiences. The media and influencers are crucial intermediaries in reaching all audiences. Different audiences, with different key messages, require different communication channels. From online to face-to-face interactions, we will draw on the widest possible range of channels, with rigorous assessment of their impact, as laid out in the new document. For each target audience, we have also developed specific messaging.

The communications strategy is underpinned by CERN’s scientific goals (laid out in the 2017-2021 Medium Term Plan and in the European Strategy for Particle Physics) and buoyed by the outstanding track record of CERN’s communication and education programmes.

Although the document is first and foremost a framework to guide the activities of CERN’s core communications, we cannot do this alone. All CERN departments, member states and collaborations are crucial participants, and at times partners, in our communications goals, so we hope they also find it useful. We will continue to work closely with many internal and external partners towards recognition of CERN’s mission, the advancement of particle physics and the integration of the process and values of science in society.

Visit of the President of the Republic of Mauritius

The President of the Republic of Mauritius, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, and her delegation were welcomed to CERN on 16 June 2017 by Charlotte Warakaulle, Director for International Relations, Emmanuel Tsesmelis, Head of Associate Member and Non-Member State Relations, and Archana Sharma, a physicist from the CMS collaboration.

During her visit, the President visited the Synchrocyclotron and the ATLAS control room. She was also introduced to some of the activities at IdeaSquare.

**From left to right: His Excellency Mr Israhyananda Dhalladoo, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Mauritius to the United Nations Office and other international organisations in Geneva; Arshana Sharma, CMS physicist; Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, President of the Republic of Mauritius; and Emmanuel Tsesmelis, Head of Associate Member and Non-Member State Relations.

Visit of the President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal

On 16 June 2017, CERN received a visit from the President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, and her delegation. Upon her arrival, the President was welcomed by Emmanuel Tsesmelis, Head of Associate Member and Non-Member State Relations.

President Bhandari visited the Synchrocyclotron and the ATLAS control room. At the end of her visit, she also signed the CERN Visitors’ Book.

Where were you and what were you doing when you first heard about the Higgs boson discovery on the 4th of July 2012?
Tell us your Higgs stories on this web form.
You can also attach your photos and videos.
The best stories will be published on our website on 4 July.
So get on your keyboard!