Dear Colleagues, 

The agendas of this week’s meetings of the Council and its committees were extremely rich and varied, and I would like to share with you some of the highlights. 

A major focus of discussions was the Medium-Term Plan (MTP), which was approved with very strong support, along with the budget for 2018. The MTP describes CERN’s scientific and financial strategy for the next five years along with a longer-term view over ten years. Council’s approval of the MTP underlines our Member States’ continuing support for the Organisation, for which we are very grateful.

The CERN family continued to grow with the Council agreeing to admit Lithuania as an Associate Member State. I will be travelling to Vilnius later this month to sign the corresponding agreement.

June is the month when we present our Annual Report to the Council. This document is a record of our achievements over the year, and if you would like a paper copy you can pick one up in in the library as of the end of next week. The report will also be available online. 

There is much more to cover, and I hope that many of you will be able to join the Directors and me in the Main Auditorium on Monday 26 June at 3.00 p.m. for a more extensive report. A webcast will be available for those who cannot attend in person.

The Council and its committees warmly applauded the continuing great performance of the Laboratory across all its scientific and other activities. This applause is for you. The Directors and I would like to add our warmest thanks and congratulations to everybody.

With best regards,

Fabiola Gianotti

The CERN Computer Security Officer and his team are mandated by the Organization to protect its users, the operations and reputation of CERN against cyber threats. In order to fulfil this mandate, prevention, protection and detection are key. The team therefore has the means to monitor any digital activity happening at CERN. We are well aware of the trust the Organization has put in us, and treat it with the highest care and integrity. Still, we would like to reaffirm our opinion that transparency in itself is paramount for any security service (see also our Bulletin article on “Transparent Monitoring for your Protection”).

The Computer Security Team’s Digital Privacy Statement describes under which circumstances and conditions the CERN Computer Security team gathers, accesses, uses and shares information about you or your usage of CERN's computing facilities and how the team protects this information. It lists our detection capabilities and how they concern your privacy. It sets the rules and regulations to which we are bound when accessing our monitoring information or, in very controlled cases, your data. While we acknowledge that such transparency might also play into the hands of attackers targeting CERN, we still believe that our transparency towards you is paramount, and you should be aware of our work.

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.

While the LHC is at the start of a new season of data taking, scientists and engineers around the world are working hard to develop brand new magnets for the LHC upgrade, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).

Indeed, for this upgrade, more than one kilometer of the LHC machine needs to be replaced. Installation will start in 2024, and there will be about 100 magnets of 11 new types: four types of main magnets (dipole and quadrupole magnets which bend and focus the beams), and seven different types of correcting magnets.

In particular, the new main quadrupole magnets, that will sit in the insertion regions on either side of the ATLAS and CMS detectors, exploit a key innovative technology providing fields beyond 10 Tesla. They are built from niobium-tin (Nb₃Sn), using a unique design that allows the peak magnetic field strength to be increased by around 50% compared with the current LHC dipoles, bringing it from about eight to about 12 tesla (T). They will squeeze the beams before collisions, replacing the quadrupoles in the LHC's triplets. These magnets will contribute to increasing the HL-LHC integrated luminosity – the total number of collisions – up to a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value.

The new quadrupole magnets are being developed in the framework of a collaboration between CERN and the LHC-AUP (LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project) consortium, which involves three US laboratories. Two types of these new quadrupole magnets of two different lengths (4.5 metres in US and 7.5 metres at CERN) are being developed. 

Now the design phase has been completed, the main magnets are in the prototype phase. Given the high cost of the magnets’ materials, tests are done on shorter models (1.5 metres) to assess the stability of the design and the mechanical structure. One of the main issues of the Nb₃Sn magnets is the management of the thermal contractions, because the materials that make up the magnet have to undergo harsh changes, from being heated to 650 °C to make the superconductor, and then cooled-down to cryogenic temperatures – needed by the magnets to work in a superconducting state.

Last year, a 1.5 metre-long short model quadrupole, made of two coils from the LARP (LHC Accelerator Research Program) consortium and two from CERN, was tested in the United States, reaching a peak magnetic field of 13 T. Another short model, with three coils made at CERN and one in the US, was also tested at CERN later in the year, to verify the performance reproducibility. It reached a peak field of 12.2 T, above nominal magnetic field, but a few tenths of a tesla below the target of ultimate performance. Another iteration of the assembly will be done in the second part of the year. A third short model of the triplets on either side of ATLAS and CMS, and the first one with a homogeneous set of coils, will soon be tested at CERN. It will be an important test to validate many features of the quadrupole design.

In January 2017, a full-length 4.5 metre-long coil – a world-record-breaking length, for a Nb₃Sn magnet in an accelerator – has been tested at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory and reached the nominal field value of 13.4 T.

Meanwhile at CERN, the winding of 7.15-metre-long coils already started in the Large Magnet Facility building. “Scaling from one to seven metres is absolutely not a trivial task, and it is one of the main technological challenges of this project,” says Ezio Todesco, a physicist in the SC Magnet Design and Technology section, in the Magnets, Superconductors and Cryostats group of the Technology department, who is leading the work for the HL-LHC project dealing with magnets for the insertion regions. “Between the end of this year and the end of next year, we will test the first full length prototypes. We will have then the confirmation that they perform as expected, and see whether some design iteration is needed,” he adds. 

Singer-songwriter Howie Day was sitting in a coffee shop in Denver one morning while on tour, when he saw in his Twitter notifications CERN had shared a parody video of his hit song “Collide”, sung from the perspective of a proton in the Large Hadron Collider. After a brief exchange on Twitter, he decided to record the parody himself, and make a new video during a visit to CERN. You can watch it below.

Sarah Charley, US communications manager for the LHC experiments, had come up with the idea for the original parody video. She created it with the help of graduate students Jesse Heilman of the University of California, Riverside, and Tom Perry and Laser Seymour Kaplan of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Heilman, now a postdoctoral researcher at Carleton University, explains why they saw the song as a gateway, to reach out to people beyond academia.

“All of us have been steeped in the science for so long that we sort of forget how to use normal language,” he says. “It's always important for academics and researchers to learn different ways to communicate what we’re doing, because we’re doing it for people and for society.”

“There’s a point in the original song where there’s an emotional build,” Heilman says. “Day sings, ‘I’ve found I’m scared to know, I’m always on your mind.’ Our parody uses that part of the song to express the hopes and fears of experimentalists looking for evidence that might not ever appear.”

“We're all experimentalists, so we're all searching for something,” he continues. “The feeling is that [the theory of] supersymmetry, while it's this thing that everybody's been so excited about for a long time, really doesn’t seem that likely to a lot of us anymore because we’re eliminating a lot of the phase space. It's sort of like this white whale hunt. And so our lyrics, ‘Can SUSY still be found?’ is this emotional cry to the physics.”

“I was flattered, and it was quite funny, too,” Day says of seeing the video for the first time. “I immediately retweeted it and then sent a direct message inquiring about a visit. I figured it was a long shot, but why not?” While at CERN, Day made a new music video for his re-recording of the parody song.

Day, who says he has always been fascinated by the “why” of things, had been aware of CERN before this project, but he had only a rough idea of what went on there. He says that it wasn’t until he got there that things started to make sense.

“Obviously nothing can prepare you for the sheer scale of the place, but also the people who worked there were amazing,” says Day. “I felt completely overwhelmed and humbled the entire time. It was truly great to be working at the site where humans may make the most important scientific discoveries of our lifetime.”

This is an excerpt from a longer piece, which you can read in Symmetry magazine. Watch the original parody video.

The Radon Dose Monitor (RaDoM) project, whose aim is to create a device to tackle the risks of high radon levels, has made it to the final round of the MassChallenge 2017 Start-up Accelerator Programme, which has the goal of helping start-up businesses succeed by providing resources such as mentoring, networking events, and office space.

Radon, a natural radioactive gas, is a colourless and odourless gas produced as part of natural decay processes. However, the gas is also hazardous and poses a risk when it accumulates in buildings, particularly in enclosed spaces such as lofts or basements. Pre-emptively monitoring the gas level in homes, workplaces, schools and other public buildings is therefore crucial. However, many currently available radon measurement systems are inefficient, expensive or can only be operated by experts. In addition, without sharing or compiling the data in an archive, health and government authorities encounter a lot of difficulties in properly monitoring geographical trends.

Using the Swiss National Radon Action Plan 2012-2020 as a guide, the RaDoM device will combine radon sensors, new software, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Lora connectivity options to produce an appliance that is better connected, more efficient and provides faster data analysis. It also complies with newly-introduced radon-limiting European legislation, which aims to reduce radon exposure risks.

Thanks to the funding from the AIDA-2020 Proof-of-Concept and the CERN Medical Applications funds, the RaDoM team will work in conjunction with Politecnico di Milano to develop a network of smart sensors based on CERN technology for monitoring radon. The participation to the MassChallenge 2017 has the goal of setting up a CERN spin-off company named SmartSensors to develop this device and software.

Whilst authorities (such as public health offices) will be able to monitor the radon levels via the central database, direct users will have access to radon data in real-time using mobile applications, and later a web interface. This will allow basic mitigation actions to be triggered when radon concentration exceeds the reference values.

Francesco La Torre, future CEO of the SmartSensors spin-off company and a Radiation Protection Physicist at CERN, details his experience in the first round of the challenge, “I gave a pitch at Campus Biotech in Geneva in front of an expert panel of six judges and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.”

The project was selected from 450 applicants for the first stage of the MassChallenge Switzerland 2017 start-up accelerator. It was then selected as one of the 75 Swiss finalists, and will officially join the programme as of 19^th June 2017.

A new agreement with partner SAFM (Scuola di Alta Formazione al Management– Institute of Higher Education in Management - in Turin, Italy) will stimulate and reinforce CERN’s entrepreneurship activities.

SAFM, a non-profit private enterprise, is supported and promoted by the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, Fondazione Edoardo Garrone and Fondazione Pirelli, together with the Association of Collège des Ingénieurs from Paris. It specialises in business education and innovation management and provides a series of entrepreneurial programmes.

The agreement provides the framework for an ensemble of collaborations on the theme of entrepreneurship and management. On one side, CERN will become a technological and operational partner for SAFM projects, and on the other, SAFM will assist CERN in creating new relationships with industry partners, incubators and potential investors. The collaboration will involve several CERN initiatives, including the Knowledge Transfer group, IdeaSquare and the CERN & Society Foundation.

CERN and SAFM have already successfully collaborated on entrepreneurship programmes, for example the Innovation for Change (I4C) project, launched in Februrary 2016 at IdeaSquare in CERN.

In 2016, the I4C rewarded the business ideas developed by 50 SAFM MBA students as well as graduate students of the Polytechnic of Turin. The ideas had to be based on credible innovative solutions, using available technologies to address global collective needs so that real startups could provide market solutions. The groups of interdisciplinary students – in the fields of business, tech and design, pitch their start-up ideas to a jury. In June 2016, AquaSmart, a smart grid system to help identify and solve water leakages, was announced as the winner of the Innovation for Change project. 

In 2017, I4C launched its second year programme, and will end with another start-up pitch competition at the SAFM & CDI Innovation Summit, held a few days after the agreement signature. This year’s I4C jury includes Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, CERN Director of International Relations, as well as members of the SAFM board of directors.

Find out more about CERN’s Entrepreneurship activities at http://kt.cern/entrepreneurship.

**From Left to Right: Raghu Movva, Project manager of SAFM; Andrea Gavosto, Director of the Agnelli Foundation; Andrea Griva, Head of innovation area of the Agnelli Foundation; Silvia Petocchi, Director of SAFM; John Elkann, Vice Chairman, Agnelli Foundation and Chairman, FCA; Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General; Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN Director for International Relations; Roberto Losito, CERN Engineering Department Head; Giovanni Anelli, CERN Knowledge Transfer Group Leader.

Laura Couto Rosado sees CERN as an ideal place to be inspired by science and to produce new works of art.

“My practice as a designer is inspired not only by natural phenomena but also by the sciences that study them and the technologies that emerge from them. I use the basic principles of applied physics to develop intriguing hybrid design products.” This is how the designer Laura Couto Rosado describes her work. Laura won the “Collide Pro Helvetia” prize, which is organised by Arts at CERN in partnership with the Swiss Arts Council “Pro Helvetia”.

The Collide Pro Helvetia prize, established in 2012, allows Swiss artists to spend three months at CERN seeking inspiration from scientists and the world of science. After her first month at CERN (June), Laura will take a short break from her residency over the summer, resuming in September. She talks enthusiastically about her experience of working at CERN so far: “CERN and its arts programme provide a perfect framework for me to refine and enhance my artistic method, the aim of which is to make design and science even more symbiotic. So far, it’s going very well,” she confirms.“I came to CERN with preconceived ideas for my project. The knowledge that I’m acquiring through my meetings with physicists exceeds all my expectations, and it is driving me to steer my research in a more refined, subtle and creative direction. For now, the best way for me to approach quantum phenomena is to let the physicists express themselves by focusing on their own experiences, giving lots of detail and using their own metaphors, even at the risk of losing the thread of my own ideas.”

Physicists are the second secret to the success of the Arts at CERN programme, as the artists interact with genuine physicists directly, not through an intermediary or a filter. Laura seems to particularly appreciate this aspect: “I’m lucky to have James Beacham as my scientific partner. He’s open and attentive; he suggests ideas for me to explire and provides me with the tools to develop my project.” She continues: I’m also very pleased with the meetings I’ve had with other CERN physicists. I really appreciate their generosity.”

CERN will no doubt leave a strong impression on Laura and her work as an artist, and she’s equally determined to make her mark on CERN before she leaves, especially on the physicists with whom she’s interacted. “Concretely, through my “Flavourful Objects” project, by the end of my residency I’d like to have put in place the basis of a vocabulary and a methodology that would allow designers to explore formalisation techniques influenced by the world of quantum physics. It would be a souvenir to thank the physicists as well as a way of monitoring the evolution of “Flavourful Objects”.

Now the skies have cleared for the LHC and the electron clouds have been reduced, the intensity ramp up continued, stepping up the number of bunches to 2556 bunches per ring, with a formal confirmation that the collider and its sub systems were functioning at each step. On Wednesday 28 June 2017, the two beams in the LHC collided, with 2556 bunches each. This is presently the maximum we can inject and bring into collision.

This has led to some new records for the LHC:

• The peak luminosity reached 1.58x10³⁴ cm^-2s^-1– a good 10% more than the 2016 record of 1.4x10³⁴ cm^-2s^-1, and also 58% more than the design value.
• The 2556 bunches, combined with an intensity of 1.15x10¹¹ protons per bunch at 6.5 TeV, means the stored beam energy has reached 300 MJ per beam.
• Very good machine availability has also allowed a record accumulation of integrated luminosity of 0.7 fb^-1 in 24 hours.

The target for the integrated luminosity in 2017 is 45 fb^-1 and on the 28 June more than 6 fb^-1 have been integrated by each of the general-purpose experiments ATLAS and CMS.

The standard LHC beam production and filling scheme foresaw 2808 bunches per ring with 288 bunches per injection from the SPS, and each bunch containing 1.15x10¹¹ protons in a beam size of 3.5 micrometres. But, since 2016, a new beam production scheme called Batch Compression Merging and Splitting (BCMS) was developed, which is of much higher brightness. It still contains the 1.15x10¹¹ protons per bunch, but the beam size is reduced to around 2.5 micrometres. When the beam density from the injectors increases, the number of collisions in the LHC also increases, hence the luminosity increase.

More dense beams also mean more energy per surface unit, hence this beam could potentially cause more damage to equipment in case that it is lost (for example, in the transfer lines between the SPS and the LHC). Because of this the maximum number of bunches is limited to 144 bunches per injection from the SPS. This, in combination with the gaps between batches for the injection kicker rise times, which was also optimised and brought down from 225 ns to 200 ns, results in the maximum of 2556 bunches per ring.

This week the LHC will not be filled with particles, but the tunnel will be occupied by many people performing maintenance on the machine and its subsystems, during this first one-week technical stop of 2017.

When the machine restarts after the technical stop, the aim is to consolidate the luminosity production with the maximum number of bunches. The next step is then to gradually explore the margins by increasing the intensity per bunch, hence pushing the luminosity even further.

Twenty-nine nominations were submitted and considered by the committee, and on 16 June 2017 five prizes were awarded for work that had a significant impact on the operation of the LHCb experiment within the last year.

The recipients are:

• Elena Dall’Occo for the evaluation and assessment of the silicon sensors that will be used in the upgrade of the LHCb VELO detector. These measurements led to the choice of the sensor technology and vendor for the VELO upgrade.
• Giulio Dujany contributed to the real-time alignment and calibration of the vertexing and tracking system of the LHCb experiment. This led to stable and precise alignment of the detector, allowing to achieve the best possible performances for physics analyses.
• Claudio Gotti worked on the development of the CLARO chip, the front-end ASIC of the LHCb RICH detector upgrade. This was a key element of the success of the RICH upgrade design.
• Lucia Grillo played a leading role the development and operation of the online real-time calibration and alignment of the LHCb tracking system. This is now part of the daily running of the LHCb experiment, and is a crucial step towards the operation mode foreseen for the LHCb detector upgrade.
• Renato Quagliani developed a new seeding algorithm for the tracking software of the LHCb detector upgrade. This algorithm shows a large gain in efficiency to find low momentum tracks, a corresponding reduction in fake-track rates and a faster execution time. 

The CERN Accelerator School (CAS), in collaboration with Max IV Laboratory in Lund, Sweden, organized a specialized course titled “Vacuum for particle accelerators”. It took place in Glumslov, Sweden, from 6 to 16 June 2017.

The course attracted 80 participants from 27 nationalities, coming from countries as far away as Canada, China, Jordan, Russia and the USA.

The intensive programme comprised 30 hours of lectures and 17 hours of practical work. The lectures covered material properties, impedance and instabilities, gauges and pumps, surface properties and treatments, beam induced effects, computational techniques and controls, manufacturing and acceptance, and a look to the future. The practical work provided hands-on experience of Molflow+, impedance calculations, mechanical and material aspects, residual gas analysis and leak detection techniques. The students also pursued an exercise based on one of the tutorials, presenting their results on the final afternoon.

A full-day visit to the Max IV laboratory and the European Spallation Source (ESS) laboratory, with seminars in the morning and visits to the facilities in the afternoon, was included in the programme. The students also had the opportunity to visit the Kronborg Castle and the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark.

The next CAS course will be on advanced accelerator physics and will be held in Egham, United Kingdom from 3-15 September 2017. In addition, a Joint Accelerator School on radio-frequency technologies will be held at Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan, on 16-26 October 2017.

Further information on forthcoming CAS courses can be found on the CAS website.

In June FCC week 2017 was held in Berlin. Jointly organised by CERN, DESY and the German Physics Society (DPG), it brought together more than 500 researchers from 147 institutes to review the progress in every domain of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study. Participants had the opportunity to get an overview of the ongoing activities, learn about the latest developments and exchange ideas in a stimulating environment.

FCC is a vibrant international collaboration, as reflected by the high number of participants and their age distribution; there has been a marked increase in the number of under 26-year-olds present. The diversity of the attendees extended beyond age and is a key strength of the collaboration, as everyone’s different backgrounds bring unique perspectives to the project, accelerating its progress. In recognition of this, the organisers of FCC Week presented seven participants with the Accelerating Diversity Prize, to encourage underrepresented groups and support gender equality in our international scientific environment.

The conference boasted a rich and intense scientific programme with 250 presentations and 50 posters, covering a wide range of topics, from detector and magnet design, to physics opportunities for each scenario and civil engineering. We even covered the economic impact of CERN accelerators. The first day opened with reports on the conceptual machine design for the three future collider scenarios, FCC-hh, FCC-ee and FCC-eh, and also included a comprehensive overview of international projects hoping to build the next generation of particle colliders. On Wednesday, two young researchers received the FCC Innovation Award for their outstanding work on the mitigation of electron cloud effects and on a simulation tool to optimise the reliability of a large collider. This year's winner are Eleanor Belli (Sapienza University, Rome0 and Jussi-Pekka Penttinen, a doctoral student at Tampere Technical University, also working for Ramentor. Their work highlights new concepts and technologies with significant impact to the the FCC-study.

In the final talk of the week, Michael Benedikt, programme leader for the FCC study, highlighted that, following the presentation of the most exciting technological and scientific advances of the previous year, the focus of the FCC Collaboration is now on preparing the Conceptual Design Report, set to be published by the end of 2018.

In line with FCC’s mission to bring the science of particle accelerators closer to the public and showcase the social value of fundamental science, an open exhibition was organised in parallel with the conference. The public was invited to embark on an interactive journey, blending sound and video art with artefacts from CERN and DESY, to explore how particle accelerators work, discover the history and achievements of the LHC and learn about plans for future colliders.

Mark your calendars for FCC Week 2018 in Amsterdam!

Sharing designs and information around the world is one of CERN’s key philosophies, and one small group in particular has spent five years contributing to the development of KiCad, an efficient tool for designing open-source hardware.

Created 25 years ago at the Grenoble Institute of Technology, today KiCad evolved to the most popular free and open-source software for the design of printed circuit boards (PCB), allowing electronics engineers from different laboratories around the world to share their designs.

Tomasz Włostowski, Maciej Sumiński and Javier Serrano, members of CERN’s beams department, joined the KiCad community five years ago and have been contributing to the development of the software ever since.

The financial contributions the team receive through the CERN & Society Foundation, as well as the dedication of the team developing the software, have been crucial to its success (the Foundation’s annual review for 2016 shows individual online donations funded more than 130 hours of development on various work packages).

This support, as well as the hours of hard work, meant the group was able to build in many new, useful features to the software. One of them is the integrated simulator support, which allows users to run a simulation after completing the design, to verify that their circuit board works as they expected.

“Another thing we accomplished thanks to the Foundation’s support was to make a unified geometry library. This is an engine calculating the proper distance between tracks and zones on the printed circuit board. Thanks to that, we now hope to improve the design rules checker, so that we can use more complex tools to define what is valid for a board,” explains Tomasz.

A lot of work has also been put into remaking the KiCad engine. This is ‘under the hood’ work that is  not directly visible for the users, but is essential for maintenance and future improvements of the program. Currently more work is being done on what users actually see. “Soon we will start working with professional designers. The goal is to get their feedback to find out which parts of KiCad should be improved,” explains Maciej.

The team will also take the symbol and component libraries that have been developed at CERN for other tools and convert them to a format suitable for KiCad. “The CERN library symbols are used to draw schematics and footprints. They represent the physical circuit board components, like chips and resistors. Implementing them to KiCad will be a huge boost for the community because they were designed by the CERN technical drawing office so are of extremely high quality.”

If you want to join the effort to enhance KiCad, and to ensure that design and development knowledge flow more freely, you can help by making a donation to the CERN & Society Foundation.

Summer has arrived. And with it, 2017’s summer students. Welcome to CERN! Ahead of you are two months of great lectures, challenging projects, the possibility to expand your network of peers… and lots of fun! In order to make sure that the fun lasts to the end, here is a small plea from the CERN Computer Security team to you and your supervisor.

CERN runs an open IT environment like you might be used to at your university. You can bring your own computers/tablets/smartphones and hook them up to our Intranet. A CERN e-mail address will be assigned to you. You can launch your own personal homepage hosted by CERN. You can instantiate virtual machines and play around with your pet IT project. Lots of freedom, lots of flexibility. But this does not imply that CERN is the Wild West. Please note that CERN has a set of Computing Rules, which define the extent of your freedom and flexibility. They usually stop where the operations and reputation of the Organization are at stake. So the browsing or downloading of illegal, unethical or offensive web content is not permitted. This includes pornographic material of any kind. Running software illegally or using pirated licence keys for software installed on your computer or a computer used by you is also not allowed. CERN has encountered some problems with this in the past (see our article “Do you have 30 kCHF pocket money?”. Furthermore, please refrain from sharing music, videos, films, games or software with your peers, friends and families while using CERN’s networks. Generally speaking, such file sharing is considered to be a copyright violation in various ways in different European countries, including in the two CERN host states, and can affect our reputation in a negative way (see “Music, Videos and the Risk for CERN”). Last, but not least, any political, commercial or profit-making activity, if not related to your CERN duties, should be managed from outside the CERN network and should not use any CERN resources (e-mail addresses, websites, etc.). Just be reasonable!

Finally, if you happen to be working on a project linked to IT, like developing software, designing a webpage, deploying a database… please do not try to reinvent the wheel. We have seen too many brilliant developments fail after the originator left CERN and the project was left in limbo. So if you are working on a project developing code, get the appropriate training first so that your software is “free” of bugs and vulnerabilities that may spoil the functionality of your code and your program. If you have been asked to set up a database or a web server, consider the solutions offered by CERN’s IT department first (the full catalogue is available here: they provide a database-on-demand service as well as various web services for free. No need to mess around with hardware, operating systems, web servers and the like – simply create your webpages! Also note that the use of external services (i.e. web services outside CERN) is not recommended from a computer security perspective. If you have any doubts or need help designing and structuring the computing part of your project, get in touch with us at Computer.Security@cern.ch. For those of you who are engaged in mathematical simulations, engineering tasks or the design of control systems: CERN provides a portfolio of engineering applications for free. There is no need to download additional software from the Internet. If you do need to, contact Software.Licences@cern.ch first, as that software might come with licence costs or may violate the copyright of third parties.

With those few reasonable basics in mind: enjoy your time at CERN!

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 Friday, 30 June, Lluis Miralles, head of the Site Management and Buildings department, and José Miguel Jiménez, head of the Technology department, alongside all the project leaders and contractors involved, took part in a ceremony to mark the end of the civil-engineering work for Building 311.

The work was completed fully on schedule thanks to the exemplary coordination between the external contractors and various CERN services. A number of aesthetic and functional improvements, for the comfort of the building’s future users, were made during the work.

The next phase of work on the building by the EN-CV, EN-EL and IT groups has already begun, which will allow the building to be delivered as planned at the end of 2017.

The first time you hear world-changing news is always memorable. The discovery of the Higgs boson was one of the most important discoveries in science to date, and it happened in our lifetime. If you were part of the particle physics community or were interested in the research, you can undoubtedly answer straight away: Where were you when you heard?

On 4 July 2012, Fabiola Gianotti, the ATLAS spokesperson, and Joe Incandela, the CMS spokesperson, announced that their experiments had found a particle consistent with the long sought-after Higgs boson.

The news generated a wave of emotion among the science community and made headlines around the world.

We asked you to share with us your memories of the day. Thanks to everyone who submitted their story. We can only publish a few, but you can share more on social media using the hashtag #HiggsStories.

Humanity and camaraderie

“I loitered around the Main Auditorium after they had filled the seating area. Surprisingly, three of us were called in at the very last second and I was placed in the first row, in front of Lyn Evans and Chris Llewellyn Smith! [Editor: Lyn Evans was the Head of the LHC project during the construction and commissioning phase and Chris Llewellyn Smith is a former CERN Director General.] In the picture, I am the gentleman who Fabiola is shooing out of the way to congratulate both of them. Perhaps the most amazing part of the entire experience was just how much humanity and camaraderie was displayed. When the CERN Director General asked if anyone had anything to say, I could hear Lyn Evans and Chris Llewellyn Smith behind me: ‘You should say something’, ‘No, YOU should say something’. It was a truly humbling moment.”

David W. Miller, ATLAS physicist from the University of Chicago

A new birth

“The day the Higgs was announced, I was at home 40 weeks pregnant looking forward to making my own discovery of the year: motherhood! But I really remember well plugging my computer into a projector and watching the webcast on a big screen, so it would feel more like I was in the main auditorium with everyone. I felt very proud of all of us for this great achievement.”

Anne-Marie Magnan, CMS physicist from Imperial College, London

26 years to complete my task

“I began my research career on 4 July 1986 at Harvard University, in the US, with Carlo Rubbia. Professor Rubbia liked to have group meetings on national holidays in the US. My first project was to look for the decay of a Higgs into gamma gamma in the UA1 experiment’s data. Exactly 26 years later we announced the discovery of a Higgs to gamma gamma and my group was part of the CMS team doing that analysis. It only took 26 years to the day to complete the project that Professor Rubbia assigned me on my first day,”

Colin Jessop, CMS Physicist from the University of Notre Dame

Champagne at breakfast

“I was in the CERN auditorium, after getting in line around 2am. Even then I was in one of the last rows. I think that day is the only time I've ever had celebratory champagne for breakfast. Completely worth it though to stay up all night, now I have an amazing story to share!”

Stephanie Hamilton, was a CERN summer student in 2012 and is now a PhD student in astronomy

We are the champions, my friends

"I thought it would be tough to miss the most tantalising seminar at CERN during my time in particle physics. But I was lucky to be at DESY, where they broadcasted the event in the main auditorium. The auditorium was packed, everyone was excited and impatiently waiting to see the results of the two experiments - the atmosphere was similar to a public screening of an international football tournament final. And when Rolf Heuer finally concluded that he believed we had a discovery, it felt like seeing the deciding goal: big applause and great joy from everyone!"

Christoph Rembser, CERN physicist for the ATLAS experiment

Pyjama party

“I was one of many who attended the 2 am (local time) simulcast of the CERN presentations announcing the Higgs Boson, at Fermilab, outside Chicago, in the US. Two things made it especially memorable. First, the announcement of the nighttime event jokingly mentioned that pyjamas were optional (I thought my faux fur tiger robe might be appropriate for the festive occasion). Secondly, my 16-year-old son, Thomas, showed great interest and decided to join me. It’s been a pleasure since to watch his interest in physics grow, as he continues to work on neutrino and dark matter physics after completing his undergraduate studies.”

William Wester, scientist at Fermilab

The discovery turns into reality

“After a sleepless month (I worked in the CMS diphoton channel and on the final combination of all Higgs searches), on 4 July 2012 I left CERN around 2am after helping prepare the CMS presentation for the seminar. Then, during the morning, I was in the main auditorium, live tweeting for CMS. Many people ask me when the Higgs boson was discovered, usually thinking that I'll say something about the CMS data. In fact, for me, the discovery happened upon seeing the ATLAS results and realising we hadn't made a mistake ourselves.”

Andre David, CERN physicist for the CMS experiment

How I became Higgs’ bodyguard

"On day two of my new job at CERN, I was asked if I would be willing to look after Professor Higgs on 4 July 2012, around a seminar to announce the latest results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Well, what would you say? Just before the seminar began, Professor Higgs was escorted to the packed auditorium. The media went mad, surging forwards. There were TV camera operators jostling for the best position, alongside journalists with audio recorders and microphones. It was astounding – this unassuming, very private, octogenarian was being treated like the latest teen pop sensation!”

Stephanie Hills, Communications officer at STFC
Read her full account here

Chasing me that far

“I was in Shanghai, on vacation. That morning the Shanghai Daily newspaper was displayed at the entrance to my hotel’s restaurant. CERN and the Higgs boson chased me that far!”

Marc Tavlet, Engineer at CERN

In the sky

Many physicists found themselves in the air at the time, on a flight to Australia for the ICHEP conference. All the latests results from the LHC experiments had to be presented at this major particle physics conference. But, two weeks before the conference, it was decided that the Higgs discovery would be announced at a seminar at CERN. Some physicists didn’t hear about the result until they landed, a somewhat bittersweet moment, as some had been working towards the result for decades.

“I was on a plane to Melbourne to take part in the ICHEP conference.”

Dario Barberis, ATLAS physicist from INFN

Kind but unhelpful

“I was attending ICHEP in Australia. I found myself sitting next to a reporter from the Australian Associated Press. I chatted with her a bit; she was a general news reporter with no science background and a little worried about how to cover this story. The next day, I found this article online. It wasn't how I had planned to make the news. But I will say that the words "kindly" and "unhelpful", which describe me in the article, also appear frequently on my teaching evaluations.”

Ken Bloom, CMS physicist from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The Higgs in Hindi

“I was in a tea shop in the city of Kanpur, India. In front of me a person was reading a newspaper and my eyes were drawn to an image of the ATLAS detector. Then I gradually realised the article was about the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson. I returned home to find on every news channel on TV were stories about the Higgs discovery. The next day, I woke up early to buy newspapers - every paper, whether it was in English, Hindi or Urdu, had a headline about the Higgs discovery.”

Mohammad Ibrahim Mirza – a physics Masters student in 2012, he is now applying for a PhD in the CMS experiment.

So lucky to be here

“It was the summer before the beginning of my university studies, and I was working as a summer helper at a factory, building industrial air conditioners. Throughout the day I followed the news coverage of the announcement on my phone, whenever I had a moment to spare, hoping that one day I could at least visit CERN, where they were discovering the secrets of the Universe. Today I still can't believe how lucky I am to get to do research for my PhD here.”

Joona Havukainen, PhD student in the CMS experiment

In the middle of nowhere

“I was travelling in the Canadian Rockies in a camper van with no access to email or news, disconnected from anything that was going on in the world and absorbed by our adventure. On a wet 4 July 2012 we made a stop to refuel in a small petrol station in the middle of nowhere. There, lying on the plastic tables in the cafe, were local newspapers with CERN and the Higgs Boson announcement making headlines.”

Anna Cook, CERN HR professional

Rewriting history

“It happened during the period when I was writing my first short and educational book, AstroParticelle on cosmic rays. Due to the good news, I had to rewrite a whole paragraph.”

Marco Arcani, science writer in Italy

A genius in my family

“I was working as a TV producer, in Lisbon. When I arrived at the studio the next day everyone was joking, congratulating me because ‘I had genius in the family’.”

Ana Higgs, TV producer in Portugal

Read more about the discovery of the Higgs boson.

You can share your story of 4 July 2012 on Twitter using the hashtag #HiggsStories.

As part of the 2016 European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS), held in Brussels, Belgium, EIROforum awarded 18-year-old Vladislav Gadalov a visit to CERN for his work in the field of computing.

After succeeding at the national level in Belarus, Vladislav presented his project at the final round of EUCYS in September 2016. The project, entitled “Geneces – a cloud ecosystem”, is a software that aims to provide smartphones with increased computing power via the cloud.

Geneces outsources all the operating processes of a mobile device to a remote server, and the result is transmitted to the phone in the form of an image or sound. As such, smartphones using this software can run powerful applications and operating systems usually only available via computers.

The software can be optimised for different types of hardware for better performance. Indeed, Vladislav has also developed a prototype of the ‘AirPhone’ – a smartphone specifically optimised for use with cloud computing, which allows 5-7 days of moderate use without charge.

Due to its specialised algorithms and optimisation, AirPhone became the fastest Remote Control System to date. The AirPhone can be used with low speed mobile internet and provides a gaming mode with 3G internet connection. AirPhone also won the Grand Award Prize in Computer Science and Special Prize by Oracle Academy at the 2017 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

During his stay, Vladislav met with CERN computer scientists and students, and visited the extensive computing facilities and CERN experiments.

Vladislav aims to continue his studies in computing and he would like to return to CERN at some point in his professional career.

The refurbishment of the accelerator complex is under way in CERN’s workshops. The total replacement of the acceleration system of the PS Booster - the second link in the accelerator chain is one of the major projects within the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) programme of work to ready the LHC injector chain for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. At the start of June, the teams celebrated an important milestone: the completion of the assembly of the first new-generation accelerating cavity. Another 27 cavities are in currently in production. They will be installed in the accelerator during Long Shutdown 2 in 2019-2020. Once they’re in place, the PS Booster will be capable of accelerating higher-intensity beams and at a higher energy of up to 2 GeV, compared with just 1.4 GeV today. The injector will be connected to the brand-new Linac4 facility at the same time.

The PS Booster’s new acceleration system is based on radio-frequency cavities built using a composite magnetic material called FineMet and developed by the Japanese firm Hitachi Metals. “The great advantage of this material is that it gives the cavities a wider bandwidth, from 0.6 to 18 MHz,” Mauro Paoluzzi, the project leader, explains. “A single cavity can cover all the required frequency ranges!” In a circular accelerator, at low energies, the frequencies of the accelerating cavities have to increase as the speed of the particles increases. The radio-frequency system is also used to manipulate the beam in various ways, which requires a wider range of frequencies. Currently, three different ferrite cavity systems are needed to cover frequencies from 0.6 to 18 MHz in the PS Booster, whereas the new cavities cover the entire range.

The project began in 2012 in the framework of a collaboration with KEK. The Japanese laboratory had already developed wide-band cavities for KEK and J-PARC and was cooperating with Hitachi Metals to develop magnetic alloys for the accelerators. KEK financed 132 of the 340 magnetic discs at the heart of the PS Booster’s new cavities, and was responsible for testing the components delivered.

The technology has been intensively tested at CERN. “A cavity of a similar type had been installed at CERN for the first time in 2004, in the LEIR, the Low-Energy Ion Ring,” Paoluzzi explains. “But we wanted to test it under real-life conditions in the PS Booster.” Two cavities were therefore installed in one of the four rings of the PS Booster in 2014 and tested in 2015. Following these conclusive tests and the publication of a report by an international group of independent experts, the CERN Management gave the green light for the cavities to be used.

They were connected to new solid-state power amplifiers manufactured in Spain. Highly efficient low-level electronics, which ensure that the system can be used to its full potential, were developed at CERN. The vacuum chambers were built in Germany, while the other components came from France, Denmark, the UK, Turkey and Slovakia. The teams have started to assemble the remaining 27 cavities. All the components will be delivered to CERN by the end of the year.

On 6 July, the Globe of Science and Innovation hosted an event as part of the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC awards significant grants to high-calibre scientists to allow them to carry out cutting-edge research in institutes in the European Union or in associated countries such as Switzerland.

The ERC’s Scientific Council held its plenary meeting at CERN from 4 to 7 July. The Swiss Confederation’s State Secretariat for Training, Research and Innovation and the Euresearch information network decided to take this opportunity to arrange an event called “10 Years of ERC: Aiming for the Stars”. Mauro Dell’Ambrogio, the Swiss Confederation’s Secretary of State for Training, Research and Innovation, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the ERC, and Michael Hengartner, President of swissuniversities, spoke about the importance of the ERC in Europe and Switzerland. François Longchamp, President of the Geneva State Council, also gave a speech on the Canton of Geneva’s support for CERN and for research in general.

Secretary of State Dell’Ambrogio was joined by Reinhilde Veugelers, member of the ERC Scientific Council, Matthias Egger, President of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Martin Vetterli, President of EPFL, and Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN, for a roundtable discussion on the role of the ERC and fundamental research in Europe. Finally, Robert Jan-Smits, Director-General for Research and Innovation at the European Commission, presented the outlook for the EU’s next research framework programme. The evening concluded with an official dinner hosted by the Secretary of State.

* From left to right: Reinhilde Veugelers, member of the ERC Scientific Council, Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN, Mauro Dell’Ambrogio, the Swiss Confederation’s Secretary of State for Training, Research and Innovation, Matthias Egger, President of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Martin Vetterli, President of EPFL. 

A bucolic atmosphere reigns as 70 sheep and two rams hungrily graze on the land between CERN’s buildings. A few days ago, the flock, which belongs to CERN’s resident shepherd, Enrico D’Ippolito, could be found in front of the Globe of Science and Innovation (photo). Since the start of this week, our woolly friends have been enjoying the grass around the ATLAS experiment. The flock “maintains” 5 hectares of land on the Meyrin site and 20 hectares on the Prévessin site, lending a hand (or rather teeth) to keep the grass under control in an efficient and natural way. Sheep have been present on the CERN site in summer for more than 45 years, since Enrico’s father brought the first flock here in the 1970s.

After ATLAS, the sheep will be sent further afield, first atop the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), then to CERN’s second main site, in Prévessin, France.

If you happen to come across a sheep that has strayed from the flock, please contact the Fire Brigade (on 74444) or the Guards Service (on 78878) so that they can get in touch with Enrico D’Ippolito.

And some final advice: please don’t feed (or scare!) the sheep, and avoid approaching the rams... let’s just say they’re not the friendliest of beasts!

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To find out more about CERN’s rich biodiversity, see this article, which was published in 2015.