The last LHC proton beam for 2017 was dumped on 4 December, at around 4 a.m. The machine was switched off and the helium inventory was secured at the surface. Soon, instead of protons, people will be running around the LHC, performing maintenance and upgrade activities, before physics restarts in the spring of 2018. December is a good time to look back at a year full of events, challenges and successes.

On 29 April, the first beam was injected, following an extended year-end technical stop (EYETS). The machine was then commissioned with a new optics system using an Achromatic Telescopic Squeezing (ATS) scheme to allow for smaller beam sizes (beta*) in the experiments.

Less than a month later, on 23 May, although with only a few bunches, the first stable beams were declared, and the experiments were able to start recording data. A short period of what is known as interleaved commissioning and intensity ramp-up started, during which a one-week scrubbing run also took place to reduce the emission of electrons from the beam pipe. This is important because it diminishes the electron clouds in the vacuum chamber, which can destabilise the beam. Stable beams with 2556 bunches were declared on 29 July and, soon after that, on 29 August, a new peak luminosity record was established – 1.74x10³⁴ cm^-2s^-1, which is nearly 75% beyond the design luminosity.

During the ramp-up to this peak luminosity, the first signs of an issue in cell 16L2 arose when beam losses were observed. On 10 August, trying to solve the 16L2 issue, the beam screen was warmed up to evaporate potentially frozen oxygen and nitrogen and to condensate it on the cold bore. Unfortunately, while this method had been used successfully in the past and in other places in the machine, this time it did not produce the desired result, and the 2556 bunches could not be kept in the LHC.

A short period of reduced beam performance commenced. This was an opportunity for the injectors to show their immense flexibility in producing different beam patterns by constructing the 8b4e (eight bunches and four empty slots) beam. This paved the way for the number of bunches in the LHC to be increased again, as electron cloud production, thought to contribute to the beam dumps as a result of the 16L2 issue, was reduced. The standard 8b4e beam was used by the LHC on 4 September, but development of the beam scheme continued in the injectors and, on 2 October, a brighter version of this beam was delivered to the LHC. In the meantime, the LHC had also started to exploit the ATS optics and the beta* was reduced from 40 cm to 30 cm, increasing the luminosity for the experiments.

As early as 30 October, the goal for 2017 was reached as the 45 fb^-1 mark was passed. On 2 November, stable beams were declared with a peak luminosity of 2.05 x 10³⁴cm^-2s^-1, more than double the design luminosity. By the time the main proton run came to an end on 11 November, more than 50 fb^-1 had been delivered to each of ATLAS and CMS. A special physics run and an intense machine development programme then took place, finishing on the morning of 4 December, which concluded the successful 2017 LHC run.

Although the Operations group is often in the spotlight when it comes to running the accelerator complex, this year’s results were obtained thanks to the effort of a much larger team of people. This team consists of members of many groups in the different departments. A big thanks to all these people for all their work, support, ideas and dedication.

We can therefore all look back on a busy but successful year. We can also look forward to a short break over the holidays before restarting the accelerator complex again in the spring with renewed energy. 

I returned to the Netherlands as a professor of experimental physics at Radboud University Nijmegen in 1998. After having enjoyed more than 10 years almost exclusively doing research work at CERN and elsewhere, I found (as I had strongly suspected) that I very much enjoyed teaching. Teaching first-year undergraduate physics courses, I came into contact with high-school teachers who were assisting students with the transition between secondary school and university. While successful for a broad group of students, many realised during their first year of university that studying physics was rather different from what they had imagined when they were still in school. As a result, there was a significant drop-out rate.

An opportunity to remedy this situation came when I read about a cosmic-ray high-school project in Canada led by experimental particle-physicist Jim Pinfold. Soon thereafter, and independently, a Nijmegen colleague, Charles Timmermans, came to me with a similar proposal for our university, and in 2000 we initiated the Nijmegen Area High School Array. Two years later, together with others, we launched the Dutch national High-School Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics (HiSPARC), which involved placing scintillator detectors on the roofs of high schools to form detector arrays. This is an excellent mixture of real science and educating high-school pupils in research methods. It has been a lot of fun to build the detectors with pupils, to legally walk on school roofs, and to analyse the data that arrive. Of course reality is unruly and it is sometimes hard to keep the objectives in focus: the schools can tend to be rather casual, if not careless, about the proper function of their set-up, whereas for the physics harvest it is essential to have a reliable network.

HiSPARC had an interesting side effect. While working with my group on the DΦ experiment at the Tevatron, focusing on finding the Higgs boson, I was, more or less adiabatically, pulled towards the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) the international cosmic-ray observatory in Argentina. The highest-energy particles in the universe are very mysterious: we don’t yet know precisely where they come from, although the latest PAO results suggest we’re getting close Extreme cosmic rays reveal clues to origin. Nor do we know how they are accelerated to energies up to 100 million TeV. My involvement as a university scientist in a high-school project has completely redirected my research career, and for the past five years I have spent all of my research time on the PAO.

Prompted by my teacher network, around 10 years ago I organised a joint effort between six nearby high schools concerning a new exam subject introduced by the Dutch ministry – “nature, life and technology”, which integrates science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. Every Friday afternoon, 350 pupils come to our faculty of science, which itself is an organisational and logistical challenge. The groups are organised during the course of the afternoon depending on the activity: a lecture for all, tutorials, and labs in biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and other subjects. Around 10 different locations in the building (and sometimes outside) are involved, and for every 20 to 25 pupils there is one teacher available. Following this project, in 2011 I initiated a two-year-long pre-university programme for gifted fifth and sixth graders in high school, which also takes place at the university and involves about 20 teachers and 14 university faculty members. The first cohort of pupils arrived in 2013, and one of the first graduates in the programme recently completed an internship at CERN.

Admittedly it is a lot of work. But it has been worth the effort. By thinking about how to teach particle physics to pupils with different backgrounds and experiences, I have gained more insight into the fundamentals of particle physics. Even the sometimes tedious experience of bringing school managements together and getting them to carry out projects outside of their comfort zones has prepared me well for some aspects of my present duty as president of CERN Council. Working with pupils and teachers has enriched my life, without having to compromise on research or management duties. And if I can combine such things with a research career, there seems little excuse for most scientists not to help educate and inspire the next generation.

Sijbrand de Jong is the president of the CERN Council 

This viewpoint was initially published in the CERN Courier magazine.

At the end of 2017, four CERN technical apprentices were awarded their certificat fédéral de capacité (CFC). After four years of training at CERN, the three physics laboratory technicians, Matthieu Locarnini, Lars Iven and Baptiste Teufel, and the electronics technician Simon Kramer have left the Laboratory.

Baptiste Teufel and Simon Kramer were also awarded the Union industrielle genevoise (UIG) prize for their excellent academic results. The prizes were presented on 5 December, at the Centre de Formation de Pont Rouge-Genève, in the presence of Pierre Maudet, Geneva state councillor in charge of the department of security and the economy.

CERN’s apprenticeship programme, which has been running since the 1960s, welcomes new students every year and has enabled dozens of young apprentices to obtain their CFC in the framework of a sandwich course.

Thanks go to the supervisors in all departments who have provided high-quality training to these young people.

Bad news turned into a wonderful surprise for those in charge of digitising CERN’s archives. Several thousand slide photos of CERN, created in the 1980s for the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), the LHC’s predecessor, have not survived the ravages of time. They have deteriorated so badly that it is often impossible to tell what they are supposed to show. But, in doing so, they have become abstract canvases, true works of art.

A dozen of these amazing images will be on display in the Main Building from 29 January to 9 February.
 

Discover the Volmeur collection
Exhibition at the Main Building
From Monday 29 January to Friday 9 February
Official opening on Monday 29 January at 5.00 pm

CERN’s OpenStack service provides you with enormous computing and storage resources to achieve your professional goals: if you need CPU power for your analyses, alternative operating systems to test your software, or if you want to run a reliable, high-performance and scalable service… OpenStack is the best choice. In fact, today all LHC experiments, the accelerators sector and the IT department rely heavily on OpenStack to run their analysis clusters and computing services. OpenStack: computing power for professionals… only!

It is the “only” which is important! CERN’s Computing Rules tolerate the personal use of CERN’s computing facilities as long as that activity is legal, non-political and non-commercial, and its resource consumption of computing power, networking bandwidth, storage capacity, etc. is minimal. And this is the crux. Deploying a hundred-odd virtual machines without a professional mandate from your experiment or your department is definitely not covered by “tolerated”. Unfortunately, this was spotted recently when one user ran a large cluster of VMs for a personal code-improvement project. In the past, we have seen similar abuses where people tried to mine crypto-currencies (“Bitcoins”, “Litcoins”, “Ethereum”) on OpenStack, using BOINC or the worldwide LHC computing grid (WLCG). All immediately attracted the attention of the service managers and led to disciplinary action. Indeed, it is hard to argue that mining crypto-currencies is a professional task. And since it involves money generated at CERN’s (or the WLCG’s) expense, this might trigger legal action by the latter. Even more worrying is that, at least once, the OpenStack service was subject to a targeted attack: an attacker misused the identity of one of our colleagues in order to request 5000 VMs in the OpenStack cluster for some abusive deeds. But such a large request already triggered some tripwires…

So, be reasonable. All these activities violate the CERN Computing Rules (and the WLCG’s security policies) as they stop CERN’s scarce resources from being used more efficiently, consume power at CERN’s expense, and benefit from a service intended for professional use only. Tolerating a bit of personal usage is to the benefit of us all. Exaggerating is not. Deploying dozens of personal VMs is overdoing it. Massive downloading of music and videos (apart from the implications on copyright), the storage of zillions of private photos (whose privacy protection is not necessarily guaranteed by the CERN Computing Rules), constant browsing of the web (diminishing your productivity), the creation of websites with commercial or political content are also a bit much.

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.

As a researcher you might often be asked for a publication list. This sometimes involves querying various databases to collect together all your publications. Sometimes the way in which these were published and name variants make this task very time consuming. ORCID can be a solution.

ORCID is a unique identifier that can accompany you throughout your career, as affiliations, and sometimes also names, change. Registration takes just 30 seconds and generates a unique ID that you can use every time you publish a paper. If you wish, you can add information about your affiliation and publications. You can also define whether specific data within your record will be private or public.

Co-funded by CERN, ORCID is a non-profit organisation supported by a global community of research organisations, publishers, funding agencies and professional associations. Four million researchers use ORCID, and its identifiers are already connected with tens of millions of articles and other scientific output.

Some universities and funding agencies in the CERN Member States and beyond are seeing the potential of ORCID to save time, and are suggesting that you aggregate your publications in your ORCID record. There are many ways to import this information into ORCID. Those of you mostly active in particle physics can link them in from Inspire. You can even allow Inspire to automatically update your ORCID record every time you publish in future, with nothing more to do on your side. Just remember, as publications are after all “public” actions, it is a good idea to make this part of your ORCID profile publicly available.

Several CERN experiments are also introducing ORCID to save time and to make sure all author lists and publications land in the right place in all databases. At present, a quarter of all ATLAS and CMS authors and half of NA62 authors already use ORCID. To avoid asking for the same information in many forms, CERN is considering asking users to share their ORCID, if they have one, when registering.

ORCID also comes in really handy when you have to submit papers to journals. The days of filling in form after form with the same administrative information when registering with a new publisher are now over. You can simply submit your manuscript by associating your new account with your ORCID account. If you, in addition, associate ORCID with your CERN account, you can even submit papers using your CERN credentials. Your information will “magically”  appear on the publisher side just in a few clicks. And your papers will also appear in INSPIRE quicker! From JHEP in particle physics, to IEEE for technology, there are already hundreds of journals that can save you time this way, and soon almost all journals will.

If you are involved in grant applications, it will be very useful for you to get an ORCID: more and more funding agencies are trying to make paperwork lighter and to use ORCIDs to avoid re-entering the same information many times.

Finally, if you are not yet convinced because you don’t want to remember yet another password and create yet another login, there is another advantage: you can log into ORCID with your CERN credentials. Just try!

Do not hesitate, get your unique ORCID identifier today! For any additional help with ORCID, including linking it to INSPIRE, just send an e-mail to the Scientific Information Service at library.desk@cern.ch.

It has been over 20 years since the original CERN History Project concluded. That initiative produced three volumes of CERN history, spanning the period from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s. The new CERN History Days on 1 and 2 February 2018 will relaunch the initiative.

The first CERN History Day will be devoted to sharing experiences from the previous CERN History Project, as well as from similar projects at other high-energy physics laboratories and scientific institutions. It will provide a platform for historians and philosophers of science, scientists and science communicators to discuss their previous experience in recording the history of CERN, as well as lessons learnt from similar projects at other laboratories around the world. Moreover, the participants will address the challenges of this project related to the rising complexity of the experiments, theoretical developments and the growth of larger and more international collaborations. Day two will be a closed session distilling the inspiration from the first day into a proposal to be submitted to the CERN Management.

Anyone interested in the history of CERN is cordially invited to attend the first day, but registration is obligatory. You will find the preliminary programme and registration form on this Indico page.

The partnership established between CERN and the HUG in 2015 for an initial period of five years was designed to make the most of the synergy between CERN’s emergency response teams and the largest hospital in the region. Resulting from an initiative of Véronique Fassnacht, Head of the CERN Medical Service, supported by Eric Herbé, Head of Advanced Life Support in the CERN Fire and Rescue Service, the agreement is built around the stationing of a cardiomobile and paramedical team at CERN. This provides coverage for not only for CERN, but also for the western side of the canton and the surrounding area: as far as first response is concerned, the border is invisible.

The partnership goes beyond the two signatories by effectively integrating CERN into Geneva’s emergency response systems. As a result of having a HUG cardiomobile on site, CERN’s emergency control room now has a permanent link and a single point of contact with the ambulance and emergency services control centre in Geneva, which responds to the general Swiss emergency number 144. As a result, CERN’s ambulance assists the Geneva fleet on request, improving service both for CERN and for the canton, and making survival much more likely in case of emergency.

Whenever you call the CERN emergency number, +41 22 767 4444, or just 74444 from a CERN phone, you are put in touch with an operator trained to rapidly assess the situation and respond accordingly. If the operator deems that the despatch of an ambulance is necessary, the Swiss control centre takes responsibility for providing the appropriate emergency response. This can lead to the additional despatch of the cardiomobile, or even an air ambulance, as has happened on more than one occasion since the partnership as established, undoubtedly saving the life of the victim on each occasion.

Emergency response relies on more than an effective ambulance service. It also depends critically on every link of the chain. In the case of cardiac arrest, for example, speed is of the utmost essence. It relies on those raising the alarm doing so without delay, on first aiders responding accordingly, and the organization and professionalism of the first response teams. CERN’s Fire and Rescue Service is structured around areas if expertise, from fire protection to advanced life support. There’s also a member of the team stationed at point 5, the furthest site from the main CERN campus, during working hours. This ensures that when an emergency happens, every member of the team is in the right place to act according to their area of expertise.

If you witness an emergency, do not hesitate to call + 41 22 767 4444 or 74444* from a CERN phone – every second counts.

As well as an immediate improvement in emergency response, the partnership with the HUG brings long-term benefits to CERN. For example, the HUG now provides training in emergency response to CERN personnel in the Medical and Fire and Rescue Services, and the laboratory’s ambulance personnel are now able to take a course leading to the award of a diploma recognised nationally in Switzerland (the Brevet Fédéral de Technicien Ambulancier). The partnership also allows on the job training for safety control room personnel.

The CERN-HUG partnership is a life-saver. According to Yann Léchevin, Head of Operations at the CERN Fire and Rescue Service, there are already some six people alive and well today who would not have survived without it. “In some of the cases I’ve witnessed, the victim’s survival has seemed nothing short of miraculous,” said Léchevin, “but it’s not: it’s the result of a well prepared safety intervention system, good reactions throughout the chain and a well-working partnership between the three principal actors, CERN, the HUG and the Swiss emergency response system.”

* The short form number 74444 works from any CERN landline, but it is strongly recommended to programme the full number into your mobiles since depending on what network you are on, the short form may not work from mobiles.

Since 4 December, the teams have been piling into the LHC for the year-end technical stop (YETS), which will last until 9 March. Five hundred people from all the technical departments and working for various contractors have sprung into action to maintain, repair and upgrade the huge accelerator.

One of the first jobs was to empty the accelerator of its 120 tonnes of helium in order to avoid any gas losses. The helium was stored on the surface or sent back to the suppliers.

Meanwhile, the first work began. This year, the shutdown is mainly focused on maintenance work, in particular on the cooling, ventilation, cryogenics and electrical supply systems (involving the EN-CV, EN-EL and TE-CRG groups). An extensive programme of electrical safety tests is also in progress.

Larger scale renovation and upgrade activities are also planned. Some of these relate to the preparation of the machine and its infrastructure for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).

One such example is the two new wire collimators being installed at Point 1. These collimators, known as TCTW (target collimator tertiary wire), include, as their name suggests, a wire that, when supplied with a current, generates an electromagnetic field to compensate for long-range beam-beam effects. These disturbances can result in limitations to the performance of the LHC and HL-LHC. Two collimators of this type were already installed at Point 5 during the extended year-end technical stop (EYETS) at the start of 2017 and were successfully tested last summer. A crystal collimator will also be installed at Point 7.

An upgraded kicker magnet will be installed at Point 8 (see the photo at the top of the article). This is one of the eight magnets used to inject the beams into the LHC at Points 2 and 8. A special coating has been applied to the inner wall of the ceramic pipe of the magnet in order to limit the increase in pressure at the start of the operation with beam. This increase in pressure can cause electrical sparking. In addition, changes have been made to the design to reduce the amount of heating, which represents a vital improvement for the High-Luminosity LHC. The new magnet will be tested during 2018 to validate its design.

Other important activities are taking place to consolidate the infrastructure, such as the installation of a new lift at Point 8, in the framework of the ongoing replacement of all the lifts at the LHC, as well as work on an overhead crane at Point 4, improvements to the electrical systems at Point 6 and consolidation of the cooling system for the beam dump. The beam control systems are also being updated. The Beam Instrumentation (BE-BI) group is carrying out important consolidation work at Point 4. All of this work involves other groups, in particular the Vacuum group, which is having to open the vacuum sectors to replace equipment, and the surveyors team, which must correctly align the equipment.  

In November 2017, the first virtual reality (VR) safety experiment took place at CERN, giving more than 100 participants the opportunity to experience the Future Circular Collider (FCC) tunnel through a virtual model. For one week, a team of researchers from Lund University were on site, working closely with CERN’s HSE unit to conduct the VR tests as part of the FCC study.

A conceptual particle accelerator housed in a new 100 km tunnel offers a unique opportunity to rethink current approaches to safety and to come up with novel concepts, such as the use of virtual reality tools to assess safety. Тhe stereoscopic 3D and motion-tracking capabilities of virtual reality headsets create an immersive and interactive 360° environment, where different safety features and scenarios can be easily tested.

The aim of this VR experiment was twofold. Firstly, to assess how virtual reality can be used to understand human behaviour in a simulated environment, and secondly, as safety is a top priority for CERN, to test some of the safety measures currently planned for the FCC.

The VR experiment was designed to test how those present in the tunnel would interpret different way-finding systems guiding them to evacuation routes. Quick identification is vital since it minimises the evacuation time. In addition, the experiment allows the concept of compartmentalisation, an option that is being actively explored for the FCC tunnel, to be tested. “Is the proposed flashing light signal effective? Can we use robots similar to the overhead monorail inspection system currently operating in the LHC to correctly deliver the message and reduce evacuation times while improving safety? These are just two of the questions the VR experiments will help us answer,” explains Oriol Rios from the HSE unit, who is involved in the FCC study.

The results of CERN’s VR experiment are valuable not only for the FCC. They can also be applied to other large-scale research facilities and extended to other scenarios. “The high immersion level obtained allows different emergency situations to be simulated in a safe, economical and efficient way,” explains Rios.

In the coming months, the team will analyse the results and draw conclusions about the feasibility of the VR approach with a view to refining it for both the FCC study and the existing research infrastructure. The results will also be used on further studies in the framework of the FCC fire safety collaboration, a global network including experts from Fermilab, DESY, MAX IV, the ESS and Lund University, led by Saverio La Mendola of CERN’s HSE unit.

On 17 January, the ALICE collaboration inaugurated a new permanent exhibition at its visits point at the experiment site (LHC point 2). Designed primarily for the general public and for high-school and university students, the new installation will be open for guided tours, making visits to ALICE possible even when the experiment cavern is not accessible. It will also be included in the official itineraries for tours organised by the CERN Visits Service.

Developed by the Spanish company Indissoluble – which also designed and built the current Microcosm– the exhibition includes three main components: a full-scale mock-up of part of the detector, display cases and information screens, and a periscope that shows the underground cavern in real time.

The highlight of the exhibition is the immersive video projected all along the mock-up and the adjacent wall. The film presents the history of ALICE and how the experiment works.

“It is my pleasure to present the new ALICE exhibition and pass it into the hands of the ALICE collaboration and CERN’s Visits Service,” declared spokesperson Federico Antinori at the inauguration. “I really want to acknowledge and thank all the people who followed the project through to completion and made this possible”.

As of now, the exhibition is officially open to people at CERN and to the general public for guided visits. Training sessions for guides are being organised.

To visit the new ALICE exhibition, contact alice-visits@cern.ch. 

The beginning of the year has been dominated by two security vulnerabilities, known as Meltdown and Spectre. Both, in their own way, allow any local user to access a system’s memory and misuse the contents for malicious purposes. Let’s see why this is bad and why it may become worse in the future…

In technical terms, Meltdown breaks down the boundary that prevents user applications from accessing privileged system memory space. This vulnerability has been confirmed to exist in all Intel processors produced since 1995, except for Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013. This includes computers by popular vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Spectre is similar, but allows an attacker to use a CPU's cache channel to read arbitrary memory from a running process. Unlike Meltdown, Spectre is known to affect Intel, AMD and ARM processors. This includes computers, tablets and smartphones made by Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Google and Lenovo, among others. Spectre is much more difficult to successfully exploit than Meltdown, as its attack surface is limited to user space processes, such as web browsers and desktop applications.

Technicalities apart, abusing Spectre or Meltdown allows an attacker to download the contents of the memory from your device and dissect it offline to extract your passwords, private SSH keys or certificates, or any other juicy information. Fortunately, the memory does not come with a big sign saying “Password here!”. Therefore, any extraction process would be slow, cumbersome and not straightforward. Hence, while proofs of concept do exist, no systematic exploitation of either Spectre or Meltdown has yet been reported.

So far, so good, no? Not quite. First of all, and most problematic so far, the fixes greatly depend on your computer’s hardware, i.e. the chip set. While the most recent and popular chip sets will receive fixes in a timely manner, other hardware might not: think of your computer’s BIOS, or your Internet-of-things device (see our Bulletin article “IoTs: The treasure trove of CERN”). So we may end up with many embedded devices that will never receive a fix for Spectre or Meltdown. Secondly, there are fears that applying the current fixes will naturally slow down any computer: depending on what your computer is used for, reported performance drops vary between a few per cent and up to 30%. But there is no need to panic (yet), as newer fixes might correct that, too. Thirdly, Intel and probably others have allegedly known about these vulnerabilities for a while. This may mean that people with malicious intent were already exploiting these vulnerabilities long before they became public knowledge. However, so far no reports have confirmed whether or not this has actually happened. And, as a result of all these things, this may be just the beginning. As with past scares of this nature, the focus of security research and the way in which the vulnerabilities are exploited will change! Think of the POODLE SSLv3 vulnerability found in the aftermath of the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability: Spectre and Meltdown are probably just the first known vulnerabilities linked to exploiting hardware weaknesses. The next generations of Spectre and Meltdown may be more intrusive and easier to exploit, and may not quickly become public knowledge. A feast for security agencies and criminals, a pain for those of us responsible for defending our IT systems…

So, this is just the beginning. Be prepared for more to come. Raise the bar! Make sure that all your systems are automatically updated when your hardware or operating system provider issues new fixes. Use the standard (automatic) update mechanisms of Windows, Linux, Mac, Android or iOS devices. And keep an eye on your embedded devices. Try to keep them up-to-date, too. Or, if you can’t, don’t connect them to the Internet or allow just anyone to access them.

You can find more details on CERN’s strategy regarding Spectre and Meltdown here. 

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 LHC isn’t getting all the attention during the year-end technical stop (YETS). The whole injector chain is undergoing its annual check-up. In addition to the maintenance work traditionally done during the YETS, this year a significant amount of the activity is devoted to the LHC Injectors Upgrade (LIU) project. In view of the challenging proton and ion beam parameters that are required for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), the LIU project team is charged with planning and executing wide-ranging upgrades to the complex.

In the Proton Synchrotron (PS), a major de-cabling campaign is taking place. Many surface and underground structures are congested with obsolete cables, some of which were installed back in the 1960s or even earlier. They prevent the installation of new cables, particularly those needed for the LIU project. Some 4000 cables with a combined length of 240 km are currently being removed from the PS. Similar de-cabling campaigns took place in the PS Booster and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) during last year’s extended year-end technical stop (EYETS), when 9000 cables were removed. 

In the meantime, the TT2 transfer line located between the PS and the SPS is undergoing a major consolidation programme, with all its 43 quadrupole magnets being replaced. These magnets were installed in the 1980s and recently started to show signs of damage. Fifteen of them will be replaced during the YETS, and the rest during the second long shutdown. The new magnets have been taken from the former Intersecting Storage Rings collider, fully renovated and certified to meet the requirements.

On another transfer line, between the PS and LEIR, new instrumentation for beam monitoring is being installed. The beam instrumentation of Linac3, the accelerator that supplies lead ions to the experiments, is being modified and upgraded, and new power converters for the magnets on its transfer lines have been installed. Brand-new emergency lighting and new cables for the GSM network have been installed in the experiment areas of all injectors.

Preparations are continuing for the newest member of CERN’s accelerator family, Linac4. Two permanent laser-based emittance monitors have been installed. Developed specially for the new linear accelerator, their purpose is to non-invasively measure the transverse emittance of the Linac4 H^- beam at its operating energy of 160 MeV. The monitors use a pulsed laser beam and diamond detectors to obtain the required H^- beam profiles and emittance.

Moving away from the LIU project to the HL-LHC, two radiofrequency crab cavities are being installed in the SPS. This will be their home for a year, during which time they will be tested with beam for the first time. The crab cavities, which were assembled at CERN in 2017, will tilt particle bunches before they collide in the HL-LHC. This will maximise the overlap of the beams and increase the probability of collisions each time they meet, otherwise known as luminosity. 

On 24 January, His Excellency Mr Jüri Ratas, Prime Minister of the Republic of Estonia, visited CERN for a tour of the site and facilities.

The Republic of Estonia has been an active member of the CERN community since joining the CMS collaboration in 1997. The country operates a Tier-2 Grid computing centre in Tallinn, and a team of Estonian scientists has joined the TOTEM experiment.

After being welcomed by three of CERN’s Directors– Frédérick Bordry, Martin Steinacher and Eckhard Elsen – who introduced CERN’s history and activities, the Prime Minister was given a tour of the ATLAS underground experiment area, before signing the guest book (see photo).

The Prime Minister was joined by his staff, representatives of the Permanent Mission of Estonia to the UN in Geneva, and two Directors from the Estonian National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics. 

When it comes to personal health or safety, we usually apply best practices to protect us from adverse events, illnesses or harm. This is more than logical, since our physical life depends on it. But how come in the virtual world, many best practices are simply ignored: “I have nothing to hide”, “Nothing will happen anyhow”?

In the physical world, we apply many safety measures automatically and repeatedly. We look left-right-left when crossing a road; we learn to swim early in childhood; we put on a coat when it is getting cold; we use a helmet when cycling; and even put on safety shoes and a harness when working in construction areas (and are required to do so when working in such areas at CERN!). We avoid dark alleys at night and do not accept gifts from strangers (chocolate, anyone?). We even lock our flat and car when leaving them, and keep our PIN codes and credit card numbers secret. And if asked if we would like a new car with an enhanced airbag system that improves personal safety by, say, just 30%, who would decline?

How come we are more relaxed in the virtual world? Are we? As we have written in previous issues of the Bulletin, our virtual life is deeply entangled with our physical world: Your smartphone and your laptop hold many more photos, documents and data about you and your family than you would ever disclose to your most intimate friends (Open door, open screen, open life...). If we lose either our smartphone or laptop to an attacker, we stand naked: (Smartphone lost - Privacy gone). On a bigger scale, our life in general is deeply tied to digital and computerised control systems and the failure of those control systems would transport us back to the stone age (Our life in symbiosis).

So, try to follow a few simple best practices for digital security:

• Choose a secure password. Yes, password rules are annoying. But they are the best solution we have. And in the end, we are CERN: we have brains! (Brain Power vs. Password Managers);
• Keep your computer and your smartphone up to date. This is a no-brainer. Auto-updates come with any operating system nowadays. Just don’t turn them off. And use an anti-virus software for additional protection. They don’t provide 100% more security, but the aforementioned 30% airbag enhancement would help too, wouldn’t it? (WannaCry? The importance of being patched!);
• Encrypt your hard disks. Laptops get lost (or stolen). Encryption at least ensures that the data stored on them cannot be extracted (Trips and Travel: some Recommendations);
• Stop – think – don’t click. If you doubt the provenance of a web address, link or URL, just don’t click on them. If an unsolicited e-mail comes with an attachment, beware. Only go ahead if you trust the sender and were expecting the e-mail (One click and BOOM…);
• And finally: you are not alone. Let us help you! If you have any questions or suggestions, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

Protect your life. In the physical world and in the digital. Have a safe and secure 2018!

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 the corner of Rue Salam and Rue Bloch, you can now find the imposing Building 107. In a few weeks’ time, this new building will be home to two technical activities vital to CERN’s operations: laboratories for the surface treatment of vacuum equipment and workshops for the development, manufacturing and treatment of printed circuit boards. Both of these activities involve chemical processes and require similar systems for ventilation and for the treatment of gaseous and liquid waste. This is why they have been brought under one roof in this new 5000 m² building, when previously they were spread across several different buildings, some of which were becoming obsolete.

The main thing you notice when you enter Building 107 is how much effort has gone into making the installations as safe as possible. The treatment of accelerator parts and electronic circuits involves many chemicals, which are stored in special tanks. These tanks, fitted with overhead cranes, are lined up in huge workshops, one of which is equipped with two 4-metre deep pits for the treatment of very large parts. 

A detailed risk assessment was carried out to ensure that no leaks were possible, and as a result the tanks not only have a double skin with leak detection sensors, but are installed above high-tech retention basins. “The retention basins also have leak detection sensors, pumping systems, buffer tanks and, most importantly, a special coating able to withstand more than 100 types of chemical,” explains Luigi Serio, who led the final phase of the Building 107 project. The basins are designed to withstand the chemicals for several days in the event of a leak. The storage areas where components arrive are also equipped with this type of retention basin.

“We did an extensive risk assessment, studying every eventuality and carrying out analyses and tests on samples of the materials,” continues Luigi Serio. The building was also designed to be fire- and earthquake-resistant. As well as the retention basins for the chemical tanks, a large basin has been installed along the west side of the building to retain and test water collected after heavy rainfall.

The way in which the ambient air in the building is checked and treated was also carefully considered. The tanks are fitted with air extractors to avoid the dispersion of gaseous emissions. Various extraction networks have been installed to take account of the different gases and operating conditions involved. The gases collected end up in an impressive service room at the top of the building, which will be controlled automatically and monitored from the CERN Control Centre. In this room, treatment systems using scrubbers or active carbon filters purify the gases. All the mechanical systems have backups.

Building 107 also houses a whole host of other equipment designed to ensure the safety of people and the environment. Cameras and an access control system ensure that only authorised persons are admitted to the building. The building also has gas and fire sensors, along with visual and audible alarms.

“In order to be completely transparent, we asked the Geneva cantonal water protection and major hazard prevention services to visit the installation,” explains Christophe Brouard, who was in charge of civil engineering for the project.“The fire and police services also checked the new building and gave us the green light.”

Finally, the cherry on the cake is that the building is equipped with solar panels and a heat recovery system, which saves around half the energy that would otherwise be needed to heat the building.

The construction of this complex building depended on contributions by many teams. “All of the CERN departments were involved,” says Nicolaas Kos, the designated representative of the building’s future users. “Without effective cooperation, this project, eagerly anticipated by the users, would never have succeeded.”

The building’s users have already started to move in and install their equipment ready for operations to start in April.

A memorable event, there are no better words to describe it: some 360 Alumni out of the 2600 currently signed up for the dedicated platform gathered at CERN on 2 and 3 February to participate in First Collisions, the kick-off event of the CERN Alumni Network. They came from Europe, the US, India and Russia, and many others watched the event remotely via live webcast. Bringing their wealth of history, experiences and ideas, the participants came to reunite with former colleagues, to develop their network, or just to come back to CERN and see how the Laboratory has changed.

The talks delivered by CERN Alumni were the centrepiece of the whole event. The inspiring speakers were able to trigger interesting discussions among the participants during the networking events and, above all, during the exclusive dinner in the CMS experimental hall, which was transformed into an impressive venue for one special evening.

First Collisions was also an opportunity for many families and friends to explore various parts of the Laboratory together. Many of the experimental sites visited by the participants and their families had been opened exclusively for them. In many cases, the spokespersons of the various experiments played the role of the guide for our Alumni: a truly unique opportunity for them all.

The event is now over but it’s “until next time” rather than “goodbye” for the members of the network. Indeed, we are just at the beginning. The CERN Alumni network will continue to grow and will be shaped by the needs, the enthusiasm and the active involvement of its members. This will require a lot of work and a strong vision. Just before Alumni First Collisions, the first meeting of the CERN Alumni Advisory Board was also held at CERN. A roadmap for the future based on these initial few months of collaboration with the new community will soon be available.

If you missed the event, you can visit the programme webpage and enjoy recordings of most of the sessions (CERN or CERN Alumni login required). Please also help us by spreading the word in your networks and inviting other CERN Alumni to join in. There will be more Collisions events and we want to reach out to as many of you as possible!

Collimators are the brave protectors of the LHC. They absorb all the particles that stray from the beam trajectory. These unruly particles may cause damage in sensitive areas of the accelerator, thereby endangering operational stability and machine safety. During the current year-end technical stop (YETS), two kinds of recently developed collimators have been installed in the LHC.

The first kind is called TCTW (Target Collimator Tertiary Wire) and will serve a double function. As its name suggests, it has a wire integrated into its jaws, vacuum-brazed into its tungsten-alloy absorbers. A current passing through the wire creates an electromagnetic field, which can bend the particle beam.

“We can look at it as half collimator, half magnet. In addition to cleaning the beam and protecting the downstream equipment, it also shifts the beam to compensate for long-range beam-beam effects. These disturbances are considered to be one of the limitations of the performance of the LHC and the HL-LHC,” explains Iñigo Lamas Garcia from the Sources, Targets and Interactions (STI) group of the Engineering department, who is in charge of the installation of the collimators.

Two of these collimators are now in place at Point 1, one on each side of the ATLAS experiment. This is the second time that wire collimators have been installed in the LHC, following a similar operation at Point 5 during last year’s extended year-end technical stop (EYETS). This new kind of collimator has been developed for the High-Luminosity LHC project. “We are installing them in the LHC way in advance as proof of concept, to validate their expected performance and benchmark the simulations,” adds Lamas Garcia.

Another type of collimator – a TCPC (Target Collimator Primary Crystal) – has been installed at Point 7. Also developed for the HL-LHC project by EN-STI, together with the UA9 collaboration, this jewel of the collimation system offers an alternative way to clean the beam – it uses silicium bent crystals to deflect the halo particles.

“We still have to capture the particles, but we can do it in a much cleaner and more efficient way, further away from the beam line. This way the beam gets less disturbed,” explains Lamas Garcia.

This is a very promising technology for the high-luminosity era of the LHC. Previously, crystal collimators have been installed in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and in the LHC, where they have been tested during the machine development periods. This new system has proven to be very effective for heavy ion beams and is currently also being developed for protons.

A third kind of collimator, a prototype made out of a coated novel material (molybdenum graphite), is the TCSPM (Target Collimator Secondary Pick-up Metallic). It has also been developed by EN-MME and EN-STI. Its purpose is to reduce the electromagnetic disturbances while still protecting the downstream equipment against beam-failure scenarios. This device was installed at Point 7 during the EYETS.

All these innovations in the collimator technology stem from the need for a better cleaning performance for the High-Luminosity LHC, when the intensity of the beam will be much higher, with more unruly particles to be removed.

On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (11 February) and throughout the preceding week, female scientists and engineers visited schools in the local area to talk about their jobs.

Some 2400 pupils between the ages of 7 and 18 from 108 different classes had the opportunity to meet 47 women working at CERN, the University of Geneva and EPFL. These women talked about their careers and their daily work, revealed the answers to a few of science’s mysteries, sometimes even conducted small experiments, and answered numerous questions on subjects ranging from supernovas to absolute zero and the speed of light. The visitors received an enthuasiastic welcome from the captivated pupils, who were delighted with the talks.

No doubt they’ve inspired lots of budding scientists and engineers!

Last year, 34 volunteers visited 70 classrooms in the local area.

Oh, how wonderful e-mails are. And chats. And the web. All this interconnectivity. Blue lines underneath keywords everywhere. Links. URLs. Redirections. All taking us to more information. More cat photos. More distractions. Awesome. Like Christmas, with presents and yet more presents to open. An infinity of presents. But some presents might result in a rude awakening…

The underlying assumption in the above is that you trust the originator of the e-mail, the chat or the webpage, the creator of the blue line, the links and the URLs … and Santa Claus for the presents. But what if you shouldn’t? Would you enter a shabby bar in a dark alley downtown (and risk getting beaten up)? Would you dare put your hand in a rabbit hole (and risk getting bitten by a fox hiding inside)? Would you accept a parcel from a stranger (and risk going to jail if it turns out to be a package of drugs)? Would you take the red balloon from Pennywise the clown and follow him around the corner?

Surely not! But why is it that many people still throw this “surely not” over board and click on random links in random e-mails from unknown senders, on random attachments from unknown authors, on random webpages of unknown origin? With one wrong click, your computer might get infected. With one single infection, your digital life gets exposed. For many of us, our computers, and even more so our laptops, smartphones or tablets, are the central digital focal points of our lives: we store our personal photos and videos on them, as well as lots of private documents, and we use them as a central hub to access our bank accounts, to communicate with our closest friends (on Facebook or Twitter, or via video or audio streams) or to consult our favourite health applications to check out our well-being. One single infection and all those photos, videos, documents, bank accounts and communication channels, as well as access to our webcams, microphones and medical information, are in the hands of people with malicious intent. Goodbye data, goodbye privacy, goodbye digital life (see our Bulletin article Enter the next level: Doxware).

So, be sensible! If you’ve just got divorced, a love letter from your ex-spouse doesn’t make sense. Neither does an attachment from Deutsche Telekom if you’ve never lived in Germany, or an e-mail in a language you’ve never spoken. Your favourite celebrity will never send you naked photos and your bank will never ask you to reset your password. And the advert promising you thousands of dollars for no work is a scam, like anything else offered to you “free” on the internet. Read more about identifying malicious e-mails here.

Hence, only the curious click the link – and put their digital assets at risk. 

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.