CERN has two essential frontiers for new discoveries: the high-energy physics programme at the LHC and the low-energy precision studies at ISOLDE and the Antiproton Decelerator (AD). In recent years, several globally recognised milestone results have been achieved at the low-energy antiproton frontier. For the last 17 years, this programme has been chaired by Walter Oelert, who was joined by Horst Breuker as deputy chair in 2012. After those many years of fruitful, constructive and visionary service, new chairs Stefan Ulmer (RIKEN) and Chloé Malbrunot (CERN) were elected by the AD experiment spokespersons last October and took over on 23 January this year.

The chairs of the ADUC (Antiproton Decelerator Users Community) perform a variety of tasks. They represent the interests of the AD community in discussions with the CERN management. To this end, they are in regular contact with the spokespersons of the approved experiments, AEgIS, ALPHA, ASACUSA, ATRAP, BASE and Gbar. They organise the annual ADUC/ELENA meetings and propose the schedule for the distribution of beam time in collaboration with the PS/SPS coordinator.

Stefan Ulmer, the newly elected chair, is a chief scientist at RIKEN, Japan, and the founder and spokesperson of CERN’s BASE collaboration. He and his team at BASE have performed the most precise measurement of the proton magnetic moment ever achieved, as well as the most precise measurement of the proton-to-antiproton charge-to-mass ratio. In 2017, BASE reported a 350-fold improved measurement of the magnetic moment of the antiproton. In addition, Stefan has invented a reservoir trap technique that enables BASE to operate independently of the AD. Based on this method, he demonstrated the trapping of antiprotons for more than 405 days. For his work on high-precision comparisons of the fundamental properties of protons and antiprotons, he received the 2014 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Fundamental Metrology.

Chloé Malbrunot, the newly elected deputy chair, first came to CERN in 2005 as a summer student. Chloé received her PhD from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her work on low-energy precision particle physics was carried out at

Canada’s particle accelerator centre, TRIUMF. She came back to CERN in 2012 as a local leader of the Stefan Meyer Institute (SMI), Vienna, to work at the ASACUSA antihydrogen spectroscopy experiment. In 2013, she obtained a CERN research fellowship and joined the AEgIS experiment. Chloé has been a member of CERN’s research staff since 2016 and is still involved in both AEgIS and ASACUSA.

Walter Oelert led the team that observed the world’s first antihydrogen atoms in 1995. A member of the ATRAP experiment, he has been the ADUC chair since 2000. One of his achievements as ADUC chair was to initiate and organise a working group for the ELENA project. He represented the project at several meetings of the SPSC and the SPC. After the approval by the Research Board he participated to the construction of the machine.

Horst Breuker became CERN’s PS/SPS coordinator in 2009. At that time, he started to work on the ELENA project. At the beginning of 2013, he became a member of the ASACUSA collaboration.

New challenges await the ADUC and its chairs, due to the higher number of experiments and the new operating modes for physics at ELENA.

The outgoing chairs wish the new incumbents great success.

The President of the Republic of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, and his delegation visited CERN on 27 February 2018. Upon his arrival, the President was welcomed by Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General, Eckhard Elsen, Director for Research and Computing, Charlotte Warakaulle, Director for International Relations, Manfred Krammer, EP Department Head and Management Liaison for Austria, Pippa Wells, Head of Member State Relations, Friedemann Eder, CERN Austrian Circle Spokesperson and Stephanie Molinari, Chief of Protocol. The President visited the CMS experiment, the LHC tunnel, the ASACUSA and AEgIS facilities and the Globe of Science and Innovation. He also attended a round table with a selection of young Austrian scientists.

On 26 February, the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, Peter Cosgrove, and his delegation were welcomed at CERN by Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General, Eckhard Elsen, Director for Research and Computing, Emmanuel Tsesmelis, Head of Associate Member and Non-Member State Relations, and Geoffrey Taylor, National Contact Physicist. The Governor-General visited the ATLAS control room and the underground experiment area, as well as the LHC tunnel.

The President of the Republic of Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi, and his delegation were welcomed on 26 February 2018 by Eckhard Elsen, Director for Research and Computing. President Nyusi visited the ATLAS control room and the underground experiment area, as well as the LHC tunnel. He also signed the CERN guest book.

The year-end technical stop (YETS) is now over halfway through and just as lots of repairs and upgrades are being done in the LHC and the injectors, each of the LHC experiments is also being refreshed.

LHCb is using this period to perform maintenance work on its many sub-detectors in order to ensure that the detector is ready to make the most of this final year of Run 2, once protons begin to circulate in the LHC again from April 2018. The two-year Long Shutdown 2 will start in December 2018 and, during this period, LHCb will face its first major upgrade, which will allow the experiment to take data at a much higher rate.

At ALICE, the time has been used to undertake a very delicate procedure: an endoscopic cleaning of the time projection chamber (TPC), which will make it more efficient and afford higher collision rates in preparation for Run 3, which will begin in 2021. Using endoscopic cameras, the insides of the TPC were explored and the presence of filaments of dust was detected. These were removed using small extractor tubes that acted like tiny vacuum cleaners. During the long shutdown, an upgrade of the TPC is planned, which will see it equipped with new readout chambers and electronics designed to allow the experiment to cope with the expected higher event rate. Since the central barrel of the TPC will stay as it is, efforts to maintain it are key to guaranteeing the correct functioning and high efficiency of the detector.

For ATLAS, work during the YETS has meant routine repairs and maintenance of the sub-detector systems. Two of the experiment’s 32 cathode strip chambers (CSC) were brought to the surface for repairs and then reinstalled in the detector. These multiwire proportional chambers are based on Georges Charpak’s Nobel-Prize-winning invention, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary last week.

At the same time, the pixel detector readout system was upgraded in relevant parts. Consolidation and maintenance has also been carried out on the semiconductor tracker, transition radiation tracker, liquid argon calorimeter, tile calorimeter, muon drift tube chambers, resistive plate chambers, thin gap chambers, forward detectors, trigger and data acquisition and the corresponding service infrastructure. 

The YETS has been especially busy for CMS. Before the Laboratory’s annual two-week closure over Christmas, part of the new pixel tracker installed in early 2017 was brought to a clean room on the surface at Point 5 to begin consolidation works in preparation for the 2018 data-collection run. Members of CMS worked there every day of the closure, performing diagnostic tests to help develop maintenance and refit procedures for the pixel system, the rest of which was brought to the clean room early in the new year. All components have now been re-inserted inside CMS and cold-testing will begin in the first few days of March.

Another key ongoing task for the collaboration is the Phase-1 Upgrade of the hadron calorimeter (HCAL). The “forward” part of this calorimeter (around the beam pipe as it enters/leaves CMS) was upgraded a year ago, while the upgrade of the so-called “endcap” section is now almost complete. The central “barrel” components will be re-equipped during the long shutdown, ready for LHC Run 3 and, eventually, HL-LHC.

In preparation for the long shutdown, CERN’s Handling Engineering team and CMS have installed a second 20-tonne crane in the underground experimental cavern housing the detector. The installation was achieved in record time and will give CMS greater flexibility for moving sub-detector elements in the cavern during LS2 and beyond.

The last few weeks of the YETS continue to occupy the full attention of CMS Technical Coordination as the detector is readied for the next round of collisions.

Computer security was easy in the last century, when malicious infections usually just involved people misusing a computer to spread or, in the worst cases, delete files. But all that has changed. Today, your computer and smartphone are the centre of your life and people with malicious intent are on the prowl, seeking to compromise them and extort money from you!

The world has changed. Today’s attackers are no longer just a few script kiddies hiding away in dark rooms, as Hollywood suggests. “WarGames” is long gone. Instead, they have created illegal enterprises with Mafia-like structures, where management, attacks on end users, computer exploitation, blackmailing and exfiltration of money are separate activities, partially outsourced to “subcontractors” or just bought from third parties:

1. Certain despicable experts create malware that exploits as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities in your favourite operating system or application;

2. Others provide lists of e-mail addresses and deliver that malware as an attachment (e.g. as an infected PDF or Microsoft Office document). Alternatively, they run e-mail campaigns asking the recipient to click on a malicious link (see our Bulletin article “Protect Your Click”). The website behind that link has already been compromised by other malicious parties, who have managed to install the malware on it (e.g. as rogue advertisements);

3. The malware is just the vehicle. Top management decides what happens next: “ransomware”, “doxware” or just creating chaos*. If it is about money, the malicious parties provide the infrastructure required to extract it (“pay us $300 in Bitcoins”) and harvest the virtual money;

4. Finally, yet more groups convert the virtual money into real dollars – clean dollars, which cannot be traced back…

Attacking the centre of your life has become a serious, but illegal, commercial business. There is a lot of money to be earned and someone will always pay. Don’t let it be you!

1. Make sure that all your computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets are up to date. Have your operating system’s update mechanism enabled and ensure that it is automatically applying any new security patches. If possible, run some decent antivirus software on it, and remember that CERN’s antivirus software for Windows computers and Macs is free to you, even for home use. That should prevent some variants of the malware in step 1 above;

2. In order to thwart step 2, do not click on links or attachments sent to you in unsolicited e-mails. Rather, check the context first: Is the e-mail addressed to you? Is it relevant to you? Does it look legitimate? If in doubt, contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch. The same is true of browsing web pages. Watch your click. If in doubt, better to Stop – Think – Don’t click! Again, if in doubt, contact us;

3. Finally, back up your important data. CERN data should be backed up on AFS, DFS or EOS – services that are designed not to lose data. At home, back up to an external hard disk (but don’t keep it permanently connected!) or buy a network-attached storage (NAS) device. If you are blackmailed, it’s unfortunate, but do not pay any ransom. This will prevent steps 3 and 4 from happening. The likelihood of getting your data back is very small. If your computer is infected with ransomware, you may be able to recover your files using the tools provided on the following website: https://www.nomoreransom.org/en/index.html (which also contains excellent advice on how to avoid becoming a victim of ransomware).

It’s your life. It’s your computing device(s). Don’t let them get you.

* If you are lost, have a look at this helpful article:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-malware-everything-you-need-to-know-about-viruses-trojans-and-malicious-software.

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 first Rucio community workshop was held on 1 and 2 March at CERN and brought together computing experts from several experiments and organisations. The focus of the workshop was the collaborative use of Rucio for large-scale scientific data management.

Rucio, an open-source project for managing community data, was developed by the ATLAS collaboration and adopted by the AMS and XENON1T collaborations. Recently, several other upcoming and ongoing experiments have started evaluating it. During the workshop, EISCAT_3D, CMS, LIGO, NA62, IceCube, CTA, COMPASS, SKA, and DUNE presented and described their experience of using Rucio, as well as their requirements for handling petascale or even exascale data sets.

Two keynote speeches were given at the workshop. Dr Tiago Quintino from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) spoke about “IO and Storage Challenges on the Path to Exascale Numerical Weather Prediction”. Dr Karan Bhatia from Google gave a talk on “The Google Cloud Platform and ATLAS – The Data Ocean Project”. The Rucio core team presented the architecture of the system and the plans for the future development of the project. The NorduGrid, Fermilab/FIFE and Open Science Grid teams described their plans to provide Rucio as a service to their user communities. A hands-on technical session with a live demo of the Rucio system and its functionality took place at the end of the workshop.

More than 100 people attended an event organised by the ESI (European Scientific Institute, Archamps) on 15 February to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of JUAS (Joint Universities Accelerator School) and the fifth anniversary of its sister school, ESIPAP (European School of Instrumentation in Particle & Astroparticle Physics). Among them were current and former students of both schools, including a sizeable number of staff and fellows, as well as PhD and technical students from CERN who had participated in JUAS or ESIPAP in recent years.

ESI’s President, Hans Hoffmann, opened the proceedings with a reminder of the need for international and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to tackle major societal challenges, such as chronic disease and energy transition. “We need to bring all potentially relevant fields of expertise together to think outside the box,” he said. “This is how, in all modesty, ESI conceives its thematic schools.”

Philippe Lebrun, former Head of Accelerator Technologies at CERN and JUAS Director since 2017, reminded the audience that JUAS exists to teach “the science and technology of accelerators, which are specific domains of physics and engineering in their own right, along with their latest developments, to the designers, builders and operators of tomorrow’s machines”. Overall, more than 1000 physicists and engineers have been trained at JUAS since it was founded.

These thoughts were echoed by Johann Collot (Grenoble), ESIPAP’s Director and a long-standing member of the ATLAS collaboration. Citing the unprecedented international effort under way to reconcile microscopic physics and modern astronomy, he told students they were lucky to be able to focus their imaginations on such a noble task, “which stems from experimentation and whose conclusion will be revealed through experimentation”.

All three speakers concurred that “ESI is one of the rare places in the world where such schools can be organised at an affordable cost.”

Particular thanks are due to Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director of Accelerators and Technology, who was representing CERN’s Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, and whose concluding remarks affirmed the importance of JUAS and ESIPAP in preparing the next generation of particle-accelerator and detector scientists and assured ESI of CERN’s ongoing support.

For more information about these schools, see the website of the European Scientific Institute

Antimatter is extremely vulnerable, as it vanishes instantly on contact with matter. However, it has successfully been stored at CERN in the framework of various experiments. Recently, the BASE experiment succeeded in storing a few antiprotons for an exceptionally long period of over a year, with no loss. Now, a new European project aims to achieve a storage time of several weeks for one billion antiprotons, which would allow them to be transported. This would be the first time that antimatter had embarked on an inter-facility journey, which is possible only between two experiments at CERN. But why transport it if it’s so fragile?

This original idea is the brainchild of Alexandre Obertelli, a physicist from the Darmstadt technical university (TU Darmstadt), who started working on it two years ago. His project, called PUMA (antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation), aims to explore new quantum phenomena that might emerge from low-energy interactions between antiprotons and slow exotic nuclei. For this to be done, scientists need to trap antimatter and transport it to a facility that delivers radioactive ion beams. This project is thus a bridge between the GBAR experiment at ELENA, which produces antiprotons, and ISOLDE, which will supply the trap with the short-lived nuclei.

A specially designed, double-zoned trap of about 70 cm in length inside a one-tonne superconducting solenoid magnet will ensure that the antimatter cloud doesn’t get annihilated during its journey and that it can be stored for a long time. The storage zone will keep a large number of antiprotons at a cryogenic temperature of 4 K. The collision zone of the trap will host the interactions. Both parts of the trap will need to be kept under the extremely high vacuum of 10^-17 mbar, which is 100 000 times lower than the LHC vacuum. Once ready, the whole structure will travel a couple of hundred metres down Route Einstein to reach its experiment site at ISOLDE.

The project consists of three phases. First, 10⁹ (one billion) antiprotons will be collected at the ELENA facility and stored in the trap. Second, the whole trap structure containing the cooled-down antiprotons will be loaded onto a van and transported to the ISOLDE facility. And finally, once it has reached its destination, the physicists will insert the slow exotic nuclei into the antimatter trap through an ultra-thin window. The extremely quick annihilation process will be closely observed. Moreover, the charge measurements of the emitted pions will make it possible to analyse the ratio of proton-to-neutron annihilations. Antiprotons were used as a probe for matter with stable nuclei at Brookhaven in the 70s and later on at LEAR at CERN. The results of this new experiment should provide evidence of new proton and neutron halos and help understand the development of thick neutron skins in radioactive nuclei, providing valuable information about unexplored quantum phenomena caused by the complex nature of nuclear matter.

“This project might lead to the democratisation of the use of antimatter,” says Alexandre Obertelli. He plans to build and develop the solenoid, trap and detector in the coming two years, with the aim of producing the first collisions at CERN in 2022.

Obertelli was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council and the five-year PUMA project was launched in January this year. Along with researchers from RIKEN in Japan and CEA Saclay and IPN Orsay in France, he has submitted a letter of intent to CERN’s SPS and PS Experiments Committee (SPSC) to pave the way towards PUMA becoming a CERN-recognised experiment.

CERN’s annual Year-End Technical Stop (YETS) has now come to a close. The Laboratory’s accelerator complex will soon begin to lumber out of its winter hibernation and resume accelerating and colliding particles.

But while the LHC has not been filled with protons since the YETS began on 4 December 2017, its tunnels and experimental caverns have been packed with people performing maintenance and repairs as well as testing components for future accelerators.

On Friday, 9 March, CERN’s Engineering (EN) department handed the accelerator complex back to the Beams (BE) department, who began the hardware commissioning phase of 2018. This commissioning will culminate in the restart of the LHC, planned for early April.

The 2018 accelerator schedule was agreed at the conclusion of the LHC Performance Workshop in Chamonix at the end of January. Frédérick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology, presented the conclusions of the workshop at a summary session for the CERN community last week. “The goal for 2018 is to provide ATLAS and CMS with an integrated luminosity of 60 fb⁻¹ and LHCb with 2 fb⁻¹ over the course of 131 days of physics,” he explained. In 2017, the LHC delivered 50 fb^-1 of data to the two main experiments over 119 days of physics, despite a vacuum problem encountered during the intensity ramp-up.

In 2018, the operators will push the Achromatic Telescopic Squeezing (ATS) scheme further. ATS was used successfully during last year’s run, making it possible to reduce the size of the beam (beta* parameter) at the collision point. The operators will adjust this parameter over the course of a run, starting with a 30-cm beta* and reducing it to 27 or even 25 cm by the end. In 2017, the beta* was reduced from 40 to 30 cm. The idea is to carry out luminosity levelling in order to prevent excessive luminosity at the beginning of a physics fill, thereby limiting the number of collisions each time two bunches of protons cross. As in 2017, the operators will adjust the overlap and crossing angle of the beams during the run in order to limit the luminosity. The teams have proposed to the experiments to have a maximum of 55 to 60 collisions per bunch crossing.

One week of the proton run will be devoted to de-squeezed beams, particularly for the benefit of the TOTEM experiment. A four-week lead-ion run is scheduled for the end of the year.

Twenty days of machine development are also planned. “Many studies need to be carried out, not only for the sake of short-term operation, but also for the run following Long Shutdown 2 [LS2] and for the High-Luminosity LHC,” explained Bordry.

When the lead-ion run is over, tests will be performed on a sector of the LHC for operation at 7 TeV per beam (as opposed to the present energy of 6.5 TeV). “The aim is to prepare the LHC to run with a collision energy of 14 TeV during Run 3,” said Bordry.

This will be the last year of LHC Run 2. “The goal is to exceed 150 fb⁻¹ during Run 2 alone,” explained Bordry. It is also an important year for all the physics facilities supplied by the accelerator complex, which will not receive beam in 2019 and 2020 during LS2. “We intend to match the record availability of 2017, in order to supply them with as many protons and ions as possible,” he continued. “As well as the physics run itself, 2018 will be crucial for the LIU (LHC Injector Upgrade) project, which will be implemented primarily during LS2, and for the HL-LHC project, construction for which will really start to get going.”

Find out more about what has been happening during the winter shutdown for the LHC, the injectors and the experiments.

In a huge warehouse at CERN sit two giant boxes – the cryostats of the protoDUNE experiment – both red on the outside and a glittering silvery-gold on the inside. Stop and listen and you might hear the screech of welding metal, the beep of cranes moving overhead or the whir of vacuum cleaners keeping the equipment dust-free. Rarely will you hear the sweet sound of a violin…

That changed one lunchbreak, when Nicola McConkey, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Sheffield brought in her violin to entertain her colleagues. Clothed in her clean-room outfit, she stepped inside one of the giant cryostats and began to play. Hear the results for yourself.

Nicola is working on the construction of ProtoDUNE, and has been playing the violin since she was a child.

"It's a wonderful team of people here building ProtoDUNE, and so when it came up in conversation that I'd brought my violin with me to CERN, we soon turned to pondering the acoustics inside the cryostat. Over our lunchbreak the next day we tried it out. For me it was like two worlds had collided, it was really exciting to play music right inside of where our detector will soon be! I can report that the acoustics are pretty good - lots of reverb!" - Nicola McConkey, violinist and post-doctoral researcher from the University of Sheffield.

This isn’t the first time that people at CERN have combined their passions for science and for music. When CERN celebrated its 60th birthday in 2014, physicists and engineers played sonified data inside experimental caverns and control rooms, see for yourself here.

At ProtoDUNE, detectors are still arriving to be inserted into the two cryostats, which internally have a height of 7.9 m and a length and width of 8.5 m. In the coming months, these cryostats will be sealed and filled with approximately 800 tonnes of liquid argon to cool them so that testing can begin using a dedicated beam line at CERN’s SPS accelerator complex.

These prototypes are testing two variations – single-phase and dual-phase – of a detection technique first developed by Nobel laureate, and former CERN director-general, Carlo Rubbia. They are a smaller-scale version of detectors planned for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE is an international experiment hosted by Fermilab in the United States that will be built underground and catch neutrinos: tiny fundamental particles that rarely interact with matter.

Once more, it’s time for a spring clean at the CERN Single Sign-On portal. We will take this opportunity to review all 20,000+ passwords used with CERN primary, secondary and service accounts. This campaign has three purposes: to identify password duplicates, to extend the password history rule to all CERN accounts, and to reward the “best” and “most creative” passwords used at CERN.

The first aim, identifying password duplicates, involves finding different accounts using the same or similar passwords. As of 1 April, we will prevent the use of a password if it is already in use by someone else. However, we will notify the affected users well in advance and also provide them with the email addresses of colleagues using the same or similar passwords - this feature shall allow users to form interest groups and share experiences of their password (usage).

In parallel, we will extend the password history rule to all CERN accounts. This history currently prevents you from reusing any passwords that you’ve used before. This will be extended to include the previous passwords of all users: once a password has been used by one of the 20,000+ CERN accounts, it can never be used again…

Finally, we have formed a joint jury of colleagues from the HR and IT departments who will reward the best, most secure and most complex passwords used at CERN, the longest ones, the most creative or prosaic, the funniest and the most inspiring. The basis will be the CERN password database. The winning passwords and the names of their account owners will be published in the next issue of the CERN Bulletin. If you want to make sure that your password is among those, please point us to your account name (please do NOT send us your password as your password is yours and only yours).

Here are some hints to help you choose good, secure passwords:

- Choose a line or two from your favorite song or poem, and use the first letter of each word. For example, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree!" becomes "IXdKKaspdd!". Mathematical formulas would also do: “a**2+sqr(b)==c^2”.

- Use a long passphrase like the sentence "InXanaduDidKublaKahnAStatelyPleasureDomeDecree!" itself.

- Alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels with mixed upper/lower case. This provides nonsense words that are usually pronounceable, and thus easily remembered. For example: "Weze-Xupe" or "DediNida3".

- Choose two short words (or a big one that you split) and join them together with one or more punctuation marks. For example: "dogs+F18" or "comP!!UTer".

Remember that your password is like your toothbrush - you do not share it and you change it regularly. Neither your colleagues, your supervisor, the Service Desk nor the Computer Security team have any valid reason to ask for it. They should not and will never do so. The same is valid for any external company: UBS, Paypal, Amazon, Facebook or Google will never ask you for your password! Your password is yours and yours alone.

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 IdeaSquare facility at CERN recently played host to a group of young refugees as part of the “We Start” programme run by the municipality of Anières in Geneva. The five-month-long programme involves training workshops for young people from the community to help them harness their creative and entrepreneurial talents in order to develop a new product or service and bring their ideas to fruition. The 2018 programme is the first to focus specifically on refugees and asylum seekers, with twelve participants from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Guinea and El Salvador involved.

The entrepreneurial enthusiasts, aged between 12 and 26, worked under the guidance of coaches from We Start, the municipality of Anières and the Hospice Général as well as five mentors from CERN: Claire Adam-Bourdarios (ATLAS), Susan Cheatham (ATLAS), Romain Muller (EU Projects Office), Oday Darwich (OpenLab/UniGE) and Harri Toivonen (IdeaSquare). The purpose of the workshop at IdeaSquare was to introduce the participants to design thinking, an iterative process similar to what scientists use, but in this case applied to ideas for products and services. They were taken through the steps for framing their problem, designing and building a prototype, testing it and finally making observations and drawing conclusions.

At the end of a three-hour workshop, each group had produced their first conceptual prototypes. One of the teams worked on developing a multilingual pen capable of making instant translations in order to help with the translation of paperwork in migration services. A second group, tasked with encouraging children to safely experiment with cooking, developed a crepe-making machine with which children could draw shapes and letters onto their pancakes before frying them. The two other groups built prototype devices for tracking the recycling behaviour of individuals and for collecting plastic waste from oceans respectively.

The workshop was held at IdeaSquare on Saturday, 10 March and was the fifth of fourteen sessions being held in 2018. This year’s We Start programme will continue until 22 June, when all four project outcomes will be presented at the Foyer d’Anières.

In a seminar on 27 March at CERN, the NA62 collaboration reported a candidate event of an ultra-rare charged kaon decay found using a new “in-flight decay” approach. While this single event cannot be used to probe beyond-Standard-Model physics, it demonstrates that the approach works well and can be applied to catch more events in the next run of data-taking, which kicks off in mid-April. For more information, read this article for the public.

For the accelerator complex, 2018 started with the year-end technical stop (YETS), during which a very dense programme of maintenance and upgrade activities took place. Despite the tight schedules, all machines were closed in time and first beams will be injected as scheduled, signalling the start of an intense final straight before the second long shutdown (LS2).

Beam commissioning in the injectors started with Linac2, followed by the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB), which injected the first protons of 2018 on 2 March. This was followed by the injection of a beam into the Proton Synchrotron (PS) on 8 March, one day ahead of schedule. At present, protons are also circulating in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), following the first injection on 16 March. Various types of beam are now being prepared and adjusted, among which is the beam required for the re-commissioning of the LHC. The first experiments in the PS East Area and n_ToF will start receiving beam on Good Friday. The other facilities in ISOLDE and the SPS North Area will follow after Easter.

In the run up to LHC beam commissioning, the operations team, in close collaboration with equipment experts, steered the LHC through an intense period of hardware re-commissioning. During that period, all electrical circuits were powered and many pre-defined tests (around 10 000) were performed and analysed in order to ensure correct functioning with the aim of identifying and solving any issues before injecting the low-intensity beam. This is expected to happen just after the Easter weekend or, if everything progresses faster than initially thought, even during the Easter weekend, but not before the so-called cold check-out is completed. During this phase, the full machine, including the experiments, should be in such a state as if it is ready to receive beam. All individual systems will then be run precisely at once, like an orchestra, as if the beam were in the machine. Only when all instruments are well tuned and play in synchronisation, music will sound and the LHC will be ready to receive beam.

Technologies from particle physics continue to find applications in cultural heritage, particularly in the art. Museums, art galleries, auction houses, art restorers and other art experts may now benefit from the use of particle detectors for art authentication and restoration.

At CERN, the Medipix collaborations have been developing pixel detector readout chips since the 1990s, enabling high-resolution, high-contrast, noise-free images – making them unique for imaging applications. Medipix2, Medipix3, Timepix and Timepix3 are state-of-the-art particle imaging and detection readout chips. Now they are being used to bring about a revolutionary improvement in the field of art authentication and restoration. A new start-up company based in Prague, InsightArt s.r.o., has adopted the technology to perform spectral X-ray scans of paintings.

Bringing together scientists and art restorers, InsightArt uses these chips to perform highly detailed X-ray scans of artworks. Unlike more conventional X-ray systems used in art authentication, the InsightArt scanner produces “colour” X-rays where colours represent different materials, i.e. pigments, in a painting. Differences in materials are detected by measuring the wavelength of X-ray photons. Furthermore, by using a system with robotic arms, analysis can be expanded to sculptures and other antique objects.

It can take between ten minutes and two hours to scan a piece of art, depending on its type and size. The read-out chips work like cameras, recording images based on the number of photons that hit the pixels when the shutter is open. The result is an X-ray image with unprecedented contrast and information on X-ray wavelengths, permitting researchers to estimate the materials used to create the piece. This helps for instance to determine whether any modifications have been performed on it over time, and even whether or not it is an authentic piece. The InsightArt company is supported by the ESA-BIC business incubator in Prague.

The Medipix collaboration was initially established at CERN to adapt particle-tracking chips, which had been developed for the LHC, to imaging applications in other fields. Subsequently, these chips have found applications in a wide range of sectors including medicine, space research, education and art. They are one of the many CERN technologies available for knowledge transfer.

Read more about other CERN projects linked to cultural heritage, in the Knowledge Transfer annual report, page 18.

On 27 March, seven L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science international rising talents visited CERN, following the 20th edition of the international award ceremony, which took place at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 22 March. A total of 15 international rising talents received grants as prizes, alongside the five laureates, Heather Zar, Mee-Mann Chang, Caroline Dean, Amy T. Austin and Janet Rossant.

As part of their prize, many of them attended a course on intellectual property in the life sciences at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which brought them to Geneva and allowed them to visit CERN and meet Fabiola Gianotti. During their visit they also saw the Synchrocyclotron, the ATLAS visitor centre and the Microcosm exhibition.

This image shows, from left to right, biological scientist Selene Lizbeth Fernandez Valverde from Mexico; Areej Abuhammad from Jordan who works on fundamental medicine; biological scientist Anna Kudryavtseva from Russia; Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's Director-General; microbiologist Ibtissem Guefrachi from Tunisia; material engineer Yukiko Ogawa from Japan; biological scientist Danielle Twilley from South Africa; and medical engineer Hiep Nguyen from Vietnam.

As announced by the Director-General in October last year, a working group has been established to foster a better quality of working life at CERN and, in particular, to identify, remedy and prevent stress in the workplace.

This multidisciplinary working group comprises people from the Human Resources (HR) department, the Health, Safety and Environmental protection (HSE) unit and the Staff Association, as well as the Ombud. Part of their work has been to analyse the stress prevention measures taken by other organisations and firms across Europe.

“At CERN, everyone knows that we have the Medical Service, the Ombud, the Staff Association and the HR department,” explains project leader and member of the HR department, Marie-Luce Falipou.“But we need to develop parallel mechanisms to enhance the quality of working life for all CERN contributors.” A three-pronged approach has been defined to achieve this aim: reduce stress factors, help people detect stress and cope with it better and, finally, provide support.

The working group will take stock of the situation at CERN by asking people to complete a survey that will be sent by e-mail, and by setting up focus groups. This will form the basis of a dedicated stress prevention programme that will be tailored to the Organization’s needs. Professor Philippe Sarnin, a specialist in the psychology of work and organisations at the University of Lyon, will provide his expert assistance throughout the project.

“Work has great benefits for our health and our morale because it allows us to broaden our horizons and interact socially,” Marie-Luce adds. “But working conditions are key and can sometimes, regrettably, cancel out these beneficial effects. That is why it’s essential to promote the quality of working life.”

As part of the awareness-raising campaign, the HR department is organising a seminar on 2 May at 2:30 p.m. in the Globe of Science and Innovation, entitled:

“The ingredients of well-being at work”

Introduction by James Purvis, Head of the Human Resources Department

Presentation by Professor Philippe Sarnin, specialist in the psychology of work and organisations at the University of Lyon.

Save the date and register on Indico: https://indico.cern.ch/event/721300/.

Do you have old photographic slides at home, capturing images from the 20th century in a 24x36mm plastic frame and requiring a projector to see them properly? If you have, and you are keen to keep them in good condition, check them out from time to time. Improper storage may well cause your memories to degrade. But this also means you may be sitting on a cache of unpredictable pieces of art, thanks to the creative helping hand of mould! This is what happened to dozens of CERN slides from the 1980s that were recently discovered in very poor condition on the site.

After some 30 years of slow degradation, the mould (bacteria) growing on the slides had slowly eaten away at the gelatine (proteins) on the surface. The slides were mostly copies of negatives dating from the time of LEP’s construction. While CERN was looking for matter at 10^-18 cm size, the 10^-3 cm micro-organisms were happily digesting our Organization’s photographic heritage!

Fortunately, the mould had attacked only a few hundred slides, in contrast to the 120,000 black and white and 300,000 colour photos that CERN has succeeded in preserving over the years. And a few of the mouldy slides have duplicates where the original image continues to exist unaffected.

The mould monsters likely came to life in damp conditions, and, through the transfer of enzymes to the surface of the slide, broke down the organic matter on its surface before absorbing the digested nutrients. Together with an abundant supply of slide film food, the mould spores had absolutely ideal conditions to successfully colonise the slides.

The resulting propagation seems as tricky to predict as cosmic particles crossing the earth and appears to be completely random! Colours and shapes in the original images have been altered in a chaotic way, while the underlying framework of the original photography has kept its design. The end result is a fascinating collision between physics, chemistry, biology and art.

So far, 25 of these slides have been digitised and printed and they form part of a growing image library known as the CERN “VolMeur Collection” (the name deriving from the surnames of the two members of CERN personnel who have been working on capturing these images in the context of the CERN Digital Memory Project).

The nascent collection was recently printed and exhibited at CERN, and there were many enquiries from people interested in purchasing mould for their walls! The CERN Digital Memory Project, working with the CERN Photo Club, is therefore offering an opportunity to purchase a limited number of these unique prints.

30 copies of each image will be printed by a professional laboratory in Geneva in either 40x60 or 60x80 cm sizes, with prices starting from 300CHF. The printing will be on Chromaluxe® aluminium sheets, using a process known as Subligraphie® which uses a special press that reaches a temperature of 200 degrees Celsius to melt the printing inks into the metal. The result is a long-lasting, lightweight, fireproof, waterproof, scratch-proof and UV-resistant print. No mould will attack these!

The sale of these prints will allow the CERN Digital Memory Project to pay for the digitisation and printing of further similar slide images for the CERN VolMeur Collection, thereby expanding the image stock. This will allow CERN to create a unique exhibition resource for the Organization.

The sale will open to the general public in two weeks’ time, but, prior to that, purchasing precedence is being given to CERN personnel and retirees who wish to place advance orders.

If you would like to order an image, please email volmeur@cern.ch for more details or get in touch via the dedicated web site http://cern.ch/volmeur. Prints will be sold on a first come, first served basis.

The ALPHA collaboration has reported the most precise direct measurement of antimatter ever made, revealing the spectral structure of the antihydrogen atom in unprecedented detail. The result, published on 4 April in Nature, is the culmination of three decades of research and development at CERN, and opens a completely new era of high-precision tests between matter and antimatter.

Measurements of the hydrogen atom’s spectral structure agree with theoretical predictions at the level of a few parts in a quadrillion (10¹⁵). Researchers have long sought to match this level of precision for antihydrogen, with a view to comparing the hydrogen measurements with those of antihydrogen. Such a comparison would allow testing charge-parity-time (CPT) invariance and searching for physics beyond the Standard Model. Until now, however, it has been all but impossible to produce and trap sufficient numbers of antihydrogen atoms, and to acquire the necessary optical interrogation technology, to make serious antihydrogen spectroscopy possible.

The ALPHA team makes antihydrogen atoms and confines them in a magnetic trap. Laser light is then shone onto the atoms, their response measured and finally compared with that of hydrogen. In 2016, the team used this approach to measure the frequency of the transition between the lowest-energy state and the first excited state (1S to 2S transition) of antihydrogen with a precision of a couple of parts in ten billion, finding good agreement with the equivalent transition in hydrogen. The measurement involved using two laser frequencies — one matching the frequency of the 1S–2S transition in hydrogen and another “detuned” from it — and counting the number of atoms that dropped out of the trap as a result of interactions between the laser and the atoms.

The latest result from ALPHA takes antihydrogen spectroscopy to the next level, using not just one but several detuned laser frequencies, with slightly lower and higher frequencies than the 1S–2S transition frequency in hydrogen. This allowed the team to measure the spectral shape of the 1S–2S antihydrogen transition and get a more precise measurement of its frequency. The shape matches that expected for hydrogen extremely well, and ALPHA was able to determine the 1S–2S antihydrogen transition frequency to a precision of a couple of parts in a trillion—a factor of 100 better than the 2016 measurement.

Although the precision still falls short of that for ordinary hydrogen, the rapid progress made by ALPHA suggests hydrogen-like precision in antihydrogen — and thus unprecedented tests of CPT symmetry — are now within reach. “This is real laser spectroscopy with antimatter, and the matter community will take notice,” explains Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. “We are realising the whole promise of CERN’s AD facility; it’s a paradigm change.” 

For more information, read the full articlehere.

OK. Apparently, our “Secure Password Competition” announced in the last Bulletin was too easily spotted as an April Fools’ gag… Congratulations to those who didn’t fall for it. And a “keep smiling” message to those who did :) Apologies if you were hoping to meet peers using a similar password…

In fact, an important cornerstone for computer security at CERN (but also elsewhere) is the secrecy of your password. Remember that, as things stand, your password is in many cases your only key to and protection for a computing service (or, in the case of CERN, all computing services through CERN’s Single Sign-On portal). Losing that key means losing any protection for your documents and data. Losing your CERN password to a malicious attacker allows them to misuse CERN’s computing resources: spamming the world with your e-mail address, instantiating virtual machines in the computer centre to illegally generate crypto-coins, downloading digital journals from the CERN Library that are paid for by CERN, spying on your work in order to later attack the computing services or control systems you work on or manage, or misusing your computer to attack others at CERN or outside CERN. At home, losing your computer’s protection puts your personal life at risk: your Facebook profile, your Twitter feeds, your Instagram posts, your Internet banking, but also your photos and videos stored locally. And your privacy in general: with your computer’s password attackers can take it over completely and log every keyboard stroke you make, watch you on your webcam, or listen to you and your surroundings using the built-in microphone.

Hence, your password must be yours alone and must remain yours alone. CERN does not store your password but just a “hash” of it – a mathematical fingerprint properly protected by the CERN IT department’s identity management professionals. The Service Desk and the Computer Security Team do not know you password. And do not want to know it. There is no need to tell them. If they need to access computing resources protected under your account, there are procedures for this that do not require your password (see the subsidiary rule to the CERN Computing Rules on “Third-party access to users' accounts and data”). Also, there is no need to share your password with other third parties like your colleagues or supervisor. They should never ask for it. If they do, let us know the reason and we’ll find a solution to avoid it. Remember that your password is like your toothbrush: you don’t share it and you change it regularly.

Hence, too, your password must not be guessable. Make it sufficiently complex by using a mixture of letters, symbols and numbers. The longer, the better. Think of sentences: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree!". Or, if you are of a mathematical mindset, use formulas: “DeltaX*DeltaP>=h/2Pi” (for physicists*), “a**2+b^2=sqr(c)” (for engineers and technicians*). In any case, do not reuse your passwords. Have different ones for different services. CERN deserves one; Facebook another. Your bank definitely a third. If you struggle to remember them all, use a password vault like “Keepass”, Apple’s “Keychain” or even the built-in password managers within Internet Explorer/Edge, Firefox, Safari (i.e. Apple “Keychain”) and Chrome. But before you start using any of them, please consider whether you are fine with putting all your eggs in one basket. Or you could consider creating a few small baskets for different purposes.

Remember what is at stake: at home, nothing less than your private life. At CERN, the Organization’s operations and reputation. Both are worth protecting. Thanks for making the effort!

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

*Please folks, do not all use these examples. We do already. Be creative and invent your own.

CERN develops and hosts various activities to encourage female students to take up science subjects and women to enter the fields of science, technology and engineering. The Django Girls workshop that took place on 23 and 24 March at CERN’s IdeaSquare is the latest such initiative.

Django Girls is a non-profit organisation that provides free programming workshops and educational materials. The goal of the foundation is to promote education for the public, including computer science education for women.

For the workshop at CERN, the IT department, the Education, Communications and Outreach (ECO) group and the Diversity Office joined forces with over 15 enthusiastic volunteer mentors, coordinated by the Women in Technology Community. Between them, they organised the workshop for the third consecutive year. IdeaSquare provided the perfect setting for the participants to get the most out of what was, for many, their first experience with coding.

A group of 36 girls and women of 21 different nationalities attended the event, which kicked off with the organisers’ words of welcome. The Deputy Head of the IT department, Maite Barroso Lopez, gave a talk sharing her own fascination with technology with the audience and discussing CERN IT’s motivation for supporting diversity.

The participants received mentoring from computer scientists, physicists and engineers at CERN, as well as from the wider local community. The dedicated professionals tutored them in creating and publishing their own websites, in small groups. The participants were taken on a guided tour of the ATLAS Visitor Centre and received CERN t-shirts. The friendly atmosphere was the icing on the cake, according to one of the students, who said “This initiative allowed us to discover programming, as well as the CERN ambiance. It was truly open to all – it was fantastic!”