In a couple of weeks the first block of machine development days will start, during which the machine is available to the various experts and specialists to perform tests, as well as machine and beam studies. These studies are generally aimed at improving the performance of the LHC and preparing for the HL-LHC, but also at better understanding observed phenomena, such as beam instabilities, etc. This will be followed by a four-day technical stop to perform the necessary maintenance not just on the machine, but also on the experiments.

A one to two day technical stop recovery normally brings the machine back to production performance, but the experiments, through the LHC Programme Committee, have decided to perform a series of special runs that are also part of the LHC physics programme. During the first of these, so-called van der Meer scans will be carried out in the experiments. These aim to calibrate precisely the luminosity measurements provided by the experiments. To do this, the injectors will prepare a high quality beam with a reduced number of bunches that will be injected, accelerated and collided in the LHC. The beam position in the experiments will then be scanned, separating the beams more or less. Doing so in the horizontal and vertical planes, we can establish an absolute luminosity measurement to which the values of the luminosity measurement system can then be compared.

The second of the special runs consists of running with un-squeezed beams with a b* of 90 m, meaning that the angle of the particles will be very low. In other words, the particles are travelling in a much more parallel fashion, allowing special physics to be carried out by CMS and TOTEM, as well as by ATLAS and ALFA.

Once these special runs are completed, normal operation will resume, again in luminosity production mode. These periods of machine development, technical stops and special runs will create plateaus in the curves of integrated luminosity, but these are already taken into account in the luminosity forecast that aims at 60 fb^-1 in 2018.

The crab cavities, used to rotate the beams of protons, have been successfully tested on 23 May – a world first. The test took place using a beam from the SPS and showed that bunches of protons could be tilted using these superconducting transverse radiofrequency cavities. These cavities will play an important role to increase the luminosity in the HL-LHC, which will be commissioned after 2025 and will increase the luminosity of the LHC by a factor of five to ten.

In the LHC, the bunches of particles meet at a small angle at each collision point of the experiments. When installed at each side of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, the crab cavities will “tilt” the bunches of protons in each beam to maximise their overlap at the collision point. Тhis way every proton in the bunch will be forced to pass through the whole length of the opposite bunch, increasing the probability of collisions and hence the luminosity. After the proton bunches have been tilted, their motion appears to be sideways – just like a crab. Crab cavities were already used in the KEKB collider in Japan for electrons and positrons, but never with protons, which are more massive and at significantly higher energies. “The crab cavities are expected to increase the overall luminosity by 15 to 20%,” explains Rama Calaga, leader of the crab cavity project.

The two first crab cavity prototypes were manufactured at CERN in 2017 in collaboration with Lancaster University and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the United Kingdom, as well as the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (USLARP). The cavities were assembled in a cryostat and tested at CERN. They are made of high-purity niobium superconducting material, operating at 2 kelvins (-271°C), in order to generate very high transverse voltage of 3.4 million volts. The cavities were installed in the SPS accelerator during the last winter technical stop to undergo validation tests with proton beams.

The first beam tests on 23 May lasted for more than 5 hours at a temperature of 4.2 K with a single proton bunch accelerated to 26 GeV and containing between 20 and 80 billion protons, almost the intensity of the LHC bunches. The crab cavities were powered to about 10% of their nominal voltage. The “crabbing” was observed using a special monitor to control the tilt along the length of the bunch. “These tests mark the start-up of a unique facility for testing superconducting cavities on a high-current, high-energy proton beam,” explains Lucio Rossi, leader of the HL-LHC project. “The results are impressive and crucial to prove the feasibility of using such cavities for increasing the luminosity in the LHC.”

In the coming months, the cavities will be commissioned to their nominal voltage of 3.4 million volts and will undergo a series of tests to fully validate their operation for the HL-LHC era. A total of 16 such cavities will be installed in the HL-LHC – eight near ATLAS and eight near CMS.  

The East Experiment Area of the Proton Synchrotron (PS) is to be given a complete makeover, ultimately producing energy savings of up to 90% on electricity and gas consumption. The renovation project, approved by the CERN Council in mid-2016, began with the civil engineering work this year.

With a volume of 100 000 m³, Building 157, also known as the PS East Experiment Area, is home to the CLOUD, CHARM and IRRAD experiments and is among the oldest and largest structures at CERN. The East Area houses four beam lines from the PS. Renovation work is urgently needed, due to the ageing of the installations, which date back to the sixties, and several technical failures. The upgrade will enable experiments and beam tests to be performed with vastly improved availability, reliability and safety.

The work will be performed in two major phases. The first, which has already begun, is the complete restoration of the building’s outer shell. The objectives are twofold, namely to provide a safe work environment and to improve energy efficiency. The civil engineering work therefore consists of removing asbestos-based elements and installing sandwich panels to reinforce the building’s thermal insulation. This will considerably reduce heating costs, as the building’s thermal consumption should decrease from 3.5 GWh/year to just 1.2 GWh/year after the renovation.

“The main challenge is to carry out the work while keeping the installation operational this year for its users”, explains Sébastien Evrard, project leader for the PS East Experiment Area renovation.

The second phase, planned for the long shutdown, will involve changing the magnets and their power supply. Power is currently supplied to the magnets on a continuous basis, with only 7% of it actually being used during beam time. Power supply to the new magnets will be on a cyclical basis, with an energy recovery stage between each cycle. The energy returned by the magnets during their de-magnetisation will be stored in capacitor banks connected to the new power converters and immediately reused during the next cycle to re-magnetise the magnets. Electricity consumption should therefore fall from 11 GWh/year to around 0.6 GWh/year.

The improvement of the building’s energy efficiency has won the SMB department and the project a significant grant from the Office cantonal de l’énergie de Genève (OCEN). This grant is a first for CERN and the department hopes that it will be an example for future renovation projects.

Additional improvements will be undertaken to improve user comfort. When the renovation is complete at the end of Long Shutdown 2 in 2021, the hall will have two new test beam areas in addition to the three existing installations.

What do some webcams, CCTV cameras, video-conferencing cameras, control devices, printers and Internet-of-Things devices connected to CERN networks have in common? They are gaping wide open – in a digital sense: they have no access protection configured and either their password protection is disabled or they are still using the default password set up by the vendor. So, while users might think they are protected, the devices are freely open to people with malicious intent.

A recent survey conducted by a computer security student looked for webpages hosted on devices belonging to the so-called “Internet of Things”. These are devices that do not necessarily look like computers, laptops or smartphones, but have similar functionalities at their core. They run some kind of Windows or Linux operating system, can send e-mails, have a wireless adapter and can be configured and accessed through an integrated web server. All you need to know is the IP address of the device and the corresponding password to sign in. But this is the crux of the problem. Such devices usually come with a default account (e.g. “admin”) and a default password (e.g. “admin”, “user”, “12345”), which the device owner is not necessarily obliged to change on first use … to the advantage of an attacker. Given that these are vendor-default passwords, once you know the model and make, you can look them up on a multitude of different websites…

What is the risk? Think of webcams used at home or in conference rooms, for CCTV monitoring or access control: with the default password, anyone can see what they display. Privacy is gone. Similarly, people with malicious intent can enable the embedded microphone and listen to your discussions. Confidential meetings go public… Default passwords for routers will expose all your network traffic to a third-party attacker, i.e. the webpages you are accessing, including any content if you do not use encrypted communication channels such as SSH, RDP, VPN or HTTPS. Worse, your home router is able to connect to all your devices at home (this is its core purpose) and the attacker can therefore probe them all for vulnerabilities in order to widen the attack. Or think of devices controlling some industrial processes, drilling machines, solar panels, coffee machines, etc. Being able to freely configure their settings might render your machine or product useless. Who would accept a plain black coffee if they’d ordered ristretto? 

So, next time you install a brand new device on your network at home or here at CERN, remember to change its default password. The same holds for any other device you inherit and start using: make sure that the configured password is known by you and only you. Select a good, strong password. Make it complex by using letters, symbols and numbers. Do not use it anywhere else. Keep it to yourself. And if your creativity fails, here are some hints:

• Choose a line or two from a song or poem and use the first letter of each word. For example, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree!" becomes "IXdKKaspdd!"
• Use a long passphrase, such as the sentence "InXanaduDidKublaKahnAStately PleasureDomeDecree!" itself, or mathematical formulae, such as "sin^2(x)+cos^2(x)=1"
• Alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels with mixed upper/lower case. This produces nonsense words that are usually pronounceable, and thus easily remembered. For example: "Weze-Xupe" or "DediNida3"
• Choose two short words (or a long one that you split) and join them together with one or more punctuation marks between them. For example: "dogs+F18" or "comP!!UTer"

Pascal Oser & Sharad Agarwal for the Computer Security Team

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

Last week, some particularly knowledgeable visitors explored CERN’s exhibitions. Several hundred museum directors and science outreach experts visited CERN in the framework of the European Network of Science Centres and Museums (ECSITE). More than a thousand science outreach experts from over 45 countries converged in Geneva, from 5 to 9 June, for the 29th annual ECSITE conference, organised by the Natural History Museum of Geneva in partnership with CERN, the University of Geneva and Campus Biotech. On Wednesday, 200 of the conference speakers came to the Globe of Science and Innovation. The doors of Ideasquare and Microcosm were thrown wide open to allow participants to exchange ideas with CERN’s scientists and science outreach experts. And throughout the conference week, participants came to CERN on guided tours organised by the visits service.

The team in charge of CERN’s exhibitions regularly collaborates with science museums all over the world to enrich the Laboratory’s offering and to meet new audiences. As a result, close to one million people visited the exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which was produced in collaboration with CERN.

For more information on how CERN supports museums, see this page.

May 2018 was one of Switzerland’s warmest Mays since meteorological measurements started in 1864. However, it is not so much the temperature but the associated thunderstorms that can have an impact on our accelerator complex and, in particular, its subsystems. Météo France declared May 2018 the month with the most thunderstorms since records began in 2000.

Over the last few weeks, nearly every evening has been marked by thunderstorms of varying degrees of violence. This has caused regular temporary drops in voltage on the national power distribution networks, which have had an impact on our equipment, resulting in some systems switching off, while others suffered from digital communication errors, leading to malfunctions. So far this year, the CERN Technical Infrastructure operators have recorded twelve serious electrical disruptions, eight of which have occurred since the end of April.

In recent years, work has been undertaken to make our systems less sensitive to these electrical power glitches. As a result, their impact has been mitigated and the subsequent recovery has become more efficient. Despite the large number of thunderstorms and thanks to the efficient recovery work, the LHC and its injector complex are performing well and the beam availability ratios are not very different from previous years.

On Tuesday, 12 June, luminosity production was interrupted for a block of machine development sessions, during which no fewer than fifteen different aspects were addressed by experts. This will be followed by a four-day technical stop to perform the necessary maintenance, repairs and minor upgrades to the machine, as well as the experiments. Before resuming luminosity production on 4 July, the experiments will perform special physics runs, for which low luminosity is generally needed. Until then, the aim is to keep the luminosity production high – as I write this report, the integrated luminosity counter for ATLAS and CMS is at 23.1 fb^-1, exceeding our goal of around 18 fb^-1, while for LHCb, we are at 0.8  fb^-1 with a goal of 0.6 fb^-1.

Back in 2015, CERN’s Diversity Office launched an initiative targeting high-school science teachers: a 20-hour group session on the topic of gender inclusive teaching was introduced into CERN’s yearly International Teacher Programme. Its aim was to raise awareness within the teaching community and help build competencies to spark the interest of both female and male students.

“One of the things I will take home is that an environment of collaboration and open discussion, rather than competition, can do wonders and can engage not only more girls, but also my more introverted male students.” - I. Molefi, Physics Teacher and participant in the 2015 International Teacher programme

Now, the Diversity Office is rolling out a 45-minute interactive module in CERN’s National Teacher Programmes, reaching out to more of the teachers visiting CERN.

In this framework, the Diversity Office organised a “Gender Equality in Education” workshop on 5 June, inviting academics and experts in the field. Among the invited speakers were Francesca Borgonovi, Senior Analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); Beth Bramley, Gender Balance Manager at the Institute of Physics (IOP); and Isabelle Collet, Associate Researcher at the Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Geneva (UNIGE). On behalf of CERN, Teacher Programmes manager Jeff Wiener and Diversity analyst Ioanna Koutava also presented the Organization’s activities.

Borgonovi presented highlights from the 2015 OECD report “The ABC of Gender Equality in Education”, which looked at data on more than half a million students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) worldwide study. The report explored the differences in performance and behaviour between female and male students. Trends showed the differences in attitudes and self-belief, as well as the expectations of students and their parents of future careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Bramley showcased initiatives launched by the IOP to improve gender balance in education in the United Kingdom, as well as research findings around stereotypes and educational practices. In particular, the 2017 report on improving gender balance showed that a three-pronged approach produced positive effects: improving girls’ resilience, developing inclusive techniques in physics lessons and training the entire school staff on unconscious biases. For more information on the IOP’s reports, resources and current projects, visit the IOP gender balance webpage.

Collet provided practical advice for teachers on gender inclusive teaching. Her examples included the difference in student behaviour when the same task was described as a “geometric test” or a “drawing game” with boys preferring the former description and girls the latter (there are a large number of papers exploring this topic, including this one). Her tips on how to make the classroom more inclusive included giving all students the opportunity to speak and encouraging cooperative rather than competitive work. For more information, see the list of Collet’s publications.

During the workshop, the Diversity Office invited people working at CERN to volunteer to give the 45-minute “Gender Equality in Education” presentation to teachers visiting CERN. If you are interested, please contact hr-diversity-info@cern.ch.

The workshop was attended by 110 participants from around CERN, as well as a group of Finnish teachers that were visiting at the time. The presentations are available to people working at CERN here.

Find out the latest news from the CERN Diversity Office here.

Automatically and autonomously monitoring digital activities on CERN’s network and its firewalls between CERN and the Internet, activities on CERN’s computing clusters and related with CERNs web services is an essential part for guaranteeing the protection of the operation and reputation of the Organization. It allows us to detect --- attempted or successful --- break-ins (“An attack for more security”; https://home.cern/cern-people/updates/2017/05/computer-security-attack-more-security) or preventive scans for vulnerabilities of our computing infrastructure (“CERN under friendly poking”; http://home.cern/cern-people/updates/2017/11/computer-security-cern-under-friendly-poking), and, of course, the abuse of our computing facilities for malicious deeds (“Virtual Misconduct – Real Consequences”; http://home.cern/cern-people/updates/2017/10/computer-security-virtual-misconduct-real-consequences). Therefore, the new CERN Security Operations Center (SOC) was deployed recently to cope with CERN’s ever growing networking and computing resources. It shall automatically check for malicious activities, alert in such cases the Computer Security Team and end-users, and provide all necessary information to conduct and conclude incident forensics (of present or past incidents).

At the core of this new SOC lies threat intelligence data, i.e. structured information on various ongoing and past computer security events. This includes “Indicators of Compromise” (IoC), e.g. malicious IP addresses or domains as well as signatures (“file hashes”) of various malware samples. IoC are constructed from the results of investigations of computer security incidents discovered at CERN, but also received from partner organisations. Through participation in vetted trust groups the CERN Computer Security Team is automatically exchanging threat intelligence information with peer organisations. This data exchange is managed by a dedicated open-source tool dubbed “MISP” (“Malware Information Sharing Platform”; http://www.misp-project.org/) and covers not only IoC but also tactics, techniques and procedures used by the various threat actors or groups of threat actors. Seeing any CERN computing activity linked to such threat intelligence data indicates a problem: CERN computing resources might have been attacked, abused or compromised…

Hence, different Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been deployed at CERN. On the network level, i.e. at CERN’s outer perimeter firewall but also at the boundaries between internal networks --- so-called “gates” ---, one network-based IDS (“Snort”; https://www.snort.org/) is simply looking for different patterns of malicious activity in the flow of data. The second, more sophisticated one (“BroIDS”; https://www.bro.org/) extracts source and destination IP addresses and port numbers, transferred data volumes as well as some high level application metadata. Similarly, host-based IDSes gather information from CERN’s computing clusters in the data centre (e.g. “LXPLUS”, “LXBATCH”), from CERN’s Single Sign On portal, from the LDAP and Active Directory services, from the centrally managed web servers, from the Domain Name Server, and from several other sources (see our Privacy Statement for the full list; https://security.web.cern.ch/security/home/en/privacy_statement.shtml). All this security data is being processed in real time and enriched with missing information such as the hostname linked to an IP address (in those cases where the source of data only contains IP addresses) or adding geographic (“GeoIP”; https://www.maxmind.com/en/home) information. All data gets stored in two different systems (“Elastic Search” and “HDFS”), one allowing the data to be easily queried and visualised via web dashboards, the other one for longer term storage where we keep data for one year maximum.

The SOC automatically compares any security data against known IoC and raises an alert every time such an IoC is being seen. Advanced intrusion detection methods employ complex rules and correlation among multiple sources of data. Subsequently, raised alerts undergo a further step of aggregation by correlating similar alerts (for example multiple CERN devices being targeted by the same malware) in order to identify common root causes. Incorporating additional context around the detected activity also allows us to easily reject false alerts. Once a security incident is detected and confirmed, incident response kicks in. At CERN, due to its unique academic environment and the associated academic freedom, computer security is highly democratic and all computing users are responsible for it.  As such, for most security incidents affected end users will receive an automatic notification informing them of the problem. The CERN Computer Security portal (https://security-issues.web.cern.ch/) provides additional guidance on how to resolve the different classes of security incidents (with or without the help of the Computer Security Team). When the situation asks for, the CERN Computer Security Team has dedicated tools for the handling of large scale security incidents (i.e. “FIR” and “the Hive”). But, hopefully, thanks to this new SOC, that should be rare: We should be able to follow the upscaling of CERN’s data center and the ever increase of traffic towards and from the Internet: Monitoring and intrusion detection for the protection of the operation and reputation of CERN.

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

CERN provides a wide range of learning and development opportunities for personnel. These cover everything from the everyday essentials of safety and computer security, through leadership and communication training to the most arcane technical skills required in a laboratory as large and complex as CERN. 

All of CERN’s courses are currently accessible through the CERN training catalogue, which provides a seamless booking system and is linked to EDH. Together, the Finance and Administrative Processes department, the Human Resources department and HSE wanted to go further, providing a service that is more than just a registration system. The new Learning Hub will provide a new look and feel, will be a one-stop shop for CERN’s entire range of courses (including online learning), and signals the end of the use of CTA (CERN Training Catalogue) and SIR (CERN Training Catalogue for online courses). It will include news to inform you of what’s new and why, and a range of other new features designed to improve your experience as a learner.

The first step in rolling out the Learning Hub took place in March this year, with several half-day test workshops with groups of CERN personnel representing all of the Organization’s learning and development needs. Their feedback will now be taken into account as the Learning Hub is prepared for launch in September. The first signs are encouraging. “Very straightforward and intuitive,” said one of the workshop participants, a newcomer to CERN. “The Learning Hub has a different philosophy to CTA and a modern and attractive interface,” added another. So what are these new features? Watch this space and tune in in September 2018.

On 20 June, CERN welcomed Borut Pahor, President
 of the Republic of Slovenia. The President and his delegation were received at Point 1 of the LHC by CERN’s Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, the Director for International Relations, Charlotte Warakaulle, the Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry, the Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Eckhard Elsen, the Director for Finance and Human Resources, Martin Steinacher, the Head of Relations with Associate and non-Member States, Emmanuel Tsesmelis, and the principal adviser for relations with Slovenia, Christoph Schäfer.

After a general introduction to CERN’s activities, Slovenia’s President visited the ATLAS control room and experimental cavern and the LHC tunnel. He was also introduced to members of the Slovenian community at CERN.

The following day, CERN welcomed Alain Berset, President of the Swiss Confederation. The President was received at Point 1 of the LHC by the Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, and began his visit with a tour of the ATLAS control room accompanied by the Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry, the Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Eckhard Elsen, the Director for Finance and Human Resources, Martin Steinacher, the Director for International Relations, Charlotte Warakaulle, the Head of Relations with the Member States, Pippa Wells, and the Head of Relations with the Host States, Friedemann Eder. 


He then went on to visit the ATLAS experimental cavern and the LHC tunnel. After a working dinner presided by Fabiola Gianotti, the President also visited the main-magnet assembly hall and then the Globe of Science and Innovation, where he met Swiss scientists and engineers.

A job in a research environment is often seen as a natural continuation of one’s university studies. However, statistics indicate that only a small percentage of science graduates will actually pursue a career in academia or in a laboratory like CERN. What options do scientists have if they have to leave their comfort zone or their field of primary interest?

With more than 3100 members distributed across the planet and active in a variety of professional fields, the one-year-old CERN Alumni network proves that there are actually plenty of options for scientists, IT specialists and engineers leaving the Organization. To help its members deal with a career transition, the CERN Alumni Office has organised the first in a series of workshops: “Moving out of academia to... the financial sector”. Indeed, the wide field of finance seems to highly value skills in computer modelling, statistical analysis of complex network systems and working with large data sets, as well as the problem-solving, internationally oriented and flexible attitude that most scientists develop throughout their studies and early career at CERN.

The first workshop was a great success, attracting 90 people who gathered at CERN and a few who connected remotely to hear from the six panellists – all CERN Alumni – who shared with the audience the positive (and less positive) aspects of working in finance as well as the best practices to effectively perform such a transition. The seminar was facilitated by Rami Kamalieddin, CERN physicist and Administrator of the CERN Finance Club.

The constructive feedback received from participants will guide the CERN Alumni Office in organising future workshops in the series, which will always involve CERN Alumni as both panellists and members of the audience. The next workshop will take place on 21 September and will focus on “Moving out of physics to data science”.

To watch the recordings of the workshop and see the presentations, visit this Indico page.

Visit http://alumni.cern for more information and to connect to the CERN Alumni Network.

On Tuesday, 12 June at 7.00 a.m., a six-day Machine Development (MD) period started, during which the machine was available for accelerator physicists and the machine equipment groups to study beam behaviour and the operation of the accelerator equipment. With the present peak LHC luminosity being twice the design luminosity, we could say that our mission is accomplished and that we don’t need to study the details of LHC beam operation any further. However, following the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) programme, after Long Shutdown 2, the beam intensity will be double the present level. After Long Shutdown 3, the HL-LHC project will then allow us to obtain even smaller beam sizes at the collision points. Our knowledge of how to keep these high intensity beams stable in the LHC is not complete and many study programmes are ongoing, in which theories are being compared to reality.

Research to understand the beam instabilities represented a large fraction of the studies over this Machine Development week. In one of the studies beam instabilities were induced by applying excitation noise to the beam. It was observed that in some cases it took a surprising 10 minutes for the transverse beam size to increase after applying the noise. 

Techniques related to new hardware were also tested, like the long-range beam-beam compensation wires embedded in the collimators. Newly installed crystal collimators were also put to the test. The Radio Frequency group assessed the use of lower accelerating voltages than normally used during the beam injection process to reduce the longitudinal oscillations of the beam.

Another focal point was the test of the ATS optics. Beam size variations in the arcs of the accelerator are used to squeeze the beam to a small focus at the centre of the experiments. A variation of these ‘Telescopic Optics’ was studied, where the beams are not round in the centre of the experiments as is normally the case but have different beam sizes in the horizontal and vertical plane as the collision point by a factor two. 

The heat load generated by the beam and transferred to the cryogenic system was also studied. This heat load will become more significant at the higher beam intensities planned for the future. At present, the heat load in the eight arcs of the LHC can differ by more than a factor of two in identical conditions and so far the reason for this difference is not understood. Tests were carried out to vary the currents of the different corrector magnet circuits in the different arcs, and to apply ‘bumps’ to the beam in the arcs. At first glance, no large effects were observed, but careful analysis might give a hint of the physics processes behind these differences around the machine. 

Overall, it was an intensive week with a strict schedule: 24 hours a day for six days for the different groups to each perform their few hours of research. In total, 15 different studies were performed. An intensive week of investment in the future, increasing our understanding of the LHC and thus improving its future performance. The next Machine Development period, which will last 5 days, is scheduled for the end of July.

The earthmovers are at work on the ATLAS site in Meyrin and at CMS in Cessy, digging the new shafts for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). The start of the work for this new phase of the project was marked by a ceremony held on 15 June, which was attended by VIP guests including the President of the State Council of the Republic and Canton of Geneva, the Prefect of the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne region, the Mayor of Meyrin, the Deputy Mayor of Cessy and representatives of CERN’s Member and Associate Member States.

“All the chapters of CERN’s history have begun with a shovel of earth, and each chapter has begun with the promise of great progress in fundamental knowledge, new technologies that benefit society, and collaboration on a European and now a global scale. This was true of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its experiments and it is true of the project for which we are gathered here today,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General.

A time capsule was placed at each site as a souvenir of the day, each containing a historical document presented by one of the two Host States as a symbol of cross-border cooperation. The capsule at the site in Cessy contains a document presented by the Geneva authorities, the telegram that was sent in 1952 by the then President of the State Council, Louis Casaï, informing the members of the Geneva government of the decision to establish a European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. In exchange, for the capsule on the Point 1 site in Meyrin, the French authorities presented the entry for “Geneva” in the Encylopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, which was written by d’Alembert in 1756 while he was staying at Voltaire’s estate in Geneva. In their speeches, the representatives of the Host States and CERN underlined the importance of the High-Luminosity LHC for the Laboratory and the crucial role played by CERN’s Member and Host States in bringing it to fruition.

The civil-engineering work centres on Points 1 (ATLAS) and 5 (CMS), where most of the equipment required to increase the luminosity for the two experiments will be installed. At each of the two sites, the underground facilities to be built consist of a shaft around 80 metres deep, a service hall that will house cryogenic and other equipment, a 300 metre long tunnel for electrical equipment (power converters) and four 50 metre service tunnels that will connect the new structures to the accelerator tunnel.  These four tunnels will house specific systems, such as radiofrequency equipment and the superconducting and cryogenic lines. Around 100 000 m³ of earth will be excavated to create the underground structures, which are due to be completed in 2021.

Five buildings representing a total surface area of 2800 m² will then be constructed above ground to house the cooling, ventilation and electrical equipment.

In parallel, the teams are working flat out to develop the equipment needed for the new accelerator. The goal is to install the first components, such as the 11-tesla dipole magnets, certain collimators, instrumentaion and shielding, during the second long shutdown in 2019-2020. However, the installation of most of the equipment and the major experiment upgrades are scheduled for the third long shutdown from 2024 to 2026.

More information on the civil engineering work for the High-Luminosity LHC is available here.
Further information about the High-Luminosity LHC project can be found here andhere (FAQ).

Canadian government announces special contribution to HL-HC project

On 25 June, the Canadian Minister of Science announced a contribution of 10 million Canadian dollars from Government of Canada to the HL-LHC project with an additional 2 million dollars in in-kind contributions. Working with the Canadian research community and industry, the TRIUMF particle accelerator centre will lead the production of five cryogenic modules for the crab cavities.

“Today, I am pleased to announce support for Canada’s outstanding researchers, engineers and technicians, whose combined efforts will further our reputation as a global leader in particle physics. Their hard work will take us one step closer to understanding the fundamental nature of matter while delivering new technologies, training and job opportunities for the next generation,” said Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science and Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities.

“We are very pleased with Canada’s contribution to the HL-LHC project, which is another important milestone in a long-standing, fruitful collaboration with CERN,” says Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General. “The technology and expertise of TRIUMF and Canadian industries, working with the strong particle physics community in the country, will be crucial for the realisation of very ambitious accelerator components for the next major project at CERN.”

The HL-LHC project led by CERN is supported by an international collaboration of 29 institutes in 13 countries, including the United States, Japan and Canada.

Read TRIUMF press release.

On 28 June 2018 a ceremony at CERN marked the donation of computing equipment to Nepal. On this occasion, 200 servers, and twelve network switches were donated to the University of Kathmandu.  The donation included more than three thousands processor cores and sixteen disk servers providing more than 700 terabytes of storage. Thanks to this equipment, the University of Kathmandu will set up high performance computing facilities to support fundamental research and the development of science and technology in Nepal.

Since 2012, CERN has regularly donated computing equipment that no longer meets its highly specific requirements on efficiency but is still more than adequate for less exacting environments. To date, a total of 2079 servers and 123 network switches have been donated to countries and international organizations, namely Algeria, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia, the SESAME laboratory in Jordan, and now Nepal.

For the members of the Beam Instrumentation group, everything is down to the wire... the wire in the new beam wire scanner they have just finished assembling, that is. The new model was developed in the framework of the LHC Injectors Upgrade (LIU) project and has been designed to cope with the increase in the performance of the accelerators. 

Beam wire scanners measure the transverse profile of the beam: an important value to know when adjusting the parameters of the accelerators. They work in the same way as a cheese wire. The wire passes through the beam, generating a flurry of secondary particles, which are then detected by a scintillator. The data gathered makes it possible to determine the position of the beam and the transverse distribution of the particles.

The accelerator complex has 25 such devices, 17 of which are in the injectors. “Some of them are around 30 years old,” explains project leader Raymond Veness from the Beam Instrumentation group. “With the increase in luminosity, we needed to renew them.”

In 2021, the injector chain will be supplying brighter beams with more intense bunches of particles. The new scanners are much faster and will be able to measure these beams without suffering damage. The wire in the model that will be installed in the SPS moves at 20 metres per second (72 km/h!), which is three times faster than the old version. “What’s more, the new models are more accurate thanks to a completely redesigned mechanical structure and a state-of-the-art control system,” continues Veness. The scanners for the PS Booster and the PS, for example, are 20 times more accurate and able to determine the position of the beam to within around 6 microns. This precision is important, as these monitors provide a reference value for the calibration of all the other beam monitoring systems.

The group is also working on the next generation of devices for measuring the beam profile, notably a device that uses the residual gas present in vacuum chambers, which is currently being tested at the SPS. The beam ionises these few molecules of residual gas and the electrons thus freed are detected by a Timepix chip. The system is less invasive than other methods and can operate continuously.

In addition to these new devices, a huge programme to upgrade and renovate the beam instrumentation systems is underway. The accelerator complex has over 7000 diagnostic devices, 2500 of which are located inside the vacuum chambers. “Several hundred beam positioning monitors or beam loss monitors in the injectors will be replaced or upgraded,” says Rhodri Jones, the Beam Instrumentation group leader. “For example, we are replacing the whole data-acquisition system for the beam position monitors in the SPS.” The work, which has already begun at the PS Booster and the PS, will continue throughout Long Shutdown 2.

Did you know that when accessing LHC Point 8 you pass exactly above the LHCb detector? To demonstrate this to visitors, the LHCb collaboration has painted a silhouette of its detector on a 1:1 scale on the road leading to the experimental site. The components are painted exactly above the real ones located 100 m below.

Every three years, athletes from 42 different European research institutes spanning 16 countries are brought together to compete in numerous sporting events, hosted and organised by one of the participating institutes. In June, a team of 55 CERN athletes and their supporters travelled to Varese, Italy, to take part in the 16th Atomiade, organised by JRC-Ispra. The Atomiade event comes under the umbrella of the numerous events organised by ASCERI (the Association of the Sports Communities of the European Research Institutes), which aims to contribute to a united Europe through regular sports meetings, bringing together members of public research institutes at a European level.

Over the course of the Saturday and the Sunday, the CERN team participated in athletics (11 medals, including six bronze, four silver and one gold), cycling (sixth place), football (losing in the semi-finals to the winning team), golf (coming thirteenth overall and sixth in the doubles event, out of over 100 competitors), mountain biking, table tennis (sixth place), tennis (first and fourth place), trail running and volleyball (second and fourth place). Although the event is first and foremost a sports competition, it also has many other facets and benefits. 

Not only does it improve working relationships between members of the CERN team, which includes representatives of most sectors, ages and professions within the Organization, enabling the athletes to meet other CERN people from outside their habitual sphere of work, but it also fosters a sense of pride in representing CERN. It builds strong team spirit, giving an incentive to train and the motivation not to let down the other members of the team. Team sport also plays a crucial role in reducing stress levels. Furthermore, the links and connections made with our European counterparts are invaluable and, in some cases, we realised that not only were we meeting on the sports field, but some members of the opposing teams also collaborate with CERN. 

All of the CERN athletes would like to thank both the Staff Association and the CERN Management for their unfailing support of the sportsmen and sportswomen who compete in the Atomiade events, and to extend an invitation to anyone who might like to participate in the next edition to contact cern.clubs@cern.ch. More details, photos and videos of the event can be found in the Staff Association’s Echo. 

Welcome to CERN! For the next couple of weeks, you will be able to breathe in the free academic world of CERN. You will have the chance to learn thanks to in-depth lectures, enjoy the freedom of exploring your preferred or assigned research topic, and form your own network of peers during your evening hours. However, “academic freedom” does not imply that there are no boundaries. At CERN, academic freedom also comes with responsibility. Below are some hints on how best to assume that responsibility securely.

You are the primary person responsible for the security of your laptop, smartphone and computer; for your account and your password; for your data; and for the programs, computing systems and services you are developing, so stop and think before acting. If you are working on a project developing code, get the appropriate training first so that your software is “free” of bugs and vulnerabilities that may spoil the functionality of your code and your program. If you have been asked to set up a database or a webserver, consider the offerings of CERN’s IT department first*: they provide virtual machines, Dropbox-like functionality, databases-on-demand as well as different web publishing frameworks for free. No need to mess around with hardware, operating systems, web servers and the like – simply create your webpages! Also note that employing external services (i.e. web services outside CERN) is not recommended from a computer security perspective. If you are in doubt or need help designing and structuring the computing part of your project, get in touch with the IT consultants. For those of you who are engaged in mathematical simulations, engineering tasks or designing control systems: CERN provides a portfolio of engineering applications for free. There is no need to download additional software from the Internet. If you do need to, contact Software.Licences@cern.ch first as that software might come with license costs or may violate copyrights of third parties.

Talking about rules and copyright violation… Although listening to music or watching videos is subject to the agreement between you and your supervisor, note that sharing videos, music or software packages via torrents or other means usually violates copyrights of third parties and hence is not permitted. CERN regularly gets complaints from those companies and if you are not ready to pay their infringement fees, you’d better make sure now that you legitimately own that video/music/software, and that any sharing applications (e.g. Bittorrent) are disabled. You must also comply with CERN’s Code of Conduct and the CERN Computing Rules. The latter stipulates that the personal use of CERN’s computing infrastructure is tolerated as long as impact is kept minimal and all activity is legal, not offensive and not of commercial nature. And gentlemen, ladies: the browsing of porn sites is considered inappropriate. If you want to spare yourself an embarrassing conversation with us, just don’t do it.

Finally, think of your laptop and PC here at CERN and at home: make sure that it is happy and healthy. Allow it to update itself by enabling “Windows Update”, Mac “Software Update” or Linux’s “yum auto-update”, and get decent free anti-virus software for your Windows computer or Mac! Take care when browsing the web – not everything is as it seems, and a bad infection of your computer might require a full reinstallation. So, if in doubt, STOP - THINK - DON’T CLICK. Good luck, and have a fun summer!!!

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.

*The full catalogue is available here.

180 138 kilometres, 248 teams, and 25 940 kilograms of CO₂reduction — these are the outcomes we can be proud of after one month of intense pedalling to and from CERN. Yet, one week after the challenge is over, CERN people haven’t stopped cycling. In fact, the campaign has convinced many to get on their bikes daily and adopt it not only as a mode of transport, but also as a lifestyle choice. Riders’ creativity was also sparked when coming up with team names. Ghostriders in the sky, Carbonara Team, LHC - Large Hadron Cyclists, Cyclopath and Quantum Spin are just a few examples.

Cinzia Pinzoni from the EP department had never really cycled before. But after accepting the challenge and signing up as a part of the “EP-SFT Ladies” team, she finally got on her bike on 1 June, hitting the road for 32 kilometres every day from Pougny, France to CERN and back. By the end of the month, she had completed 483 kilometres. “It just feels so right and now I will never stop,” states Cinzia. Her experience is inspiring and motivating: “I have more energy, I’m more mentally alert and my health has improved. The benefits are endless!”

Cinzia would also like to encourage more women to start cycling. “In the beginning it seems complicated, because you have to plan for bringing a change of clothes and taking a shower, but it is actually so simple! And being outdoors before and after working in the office is a great way to manage your time.”  

Other Bike to work participants reported positive experiences and expressed the will to dedicate themselves more to cycling activities. “This campaign made me realise that biking is not that complicated even if the weather conditions are not perfect. Imagine a world where 10% of the population decides to commute by bike: less traffic noise, less pollution, less cardiovascular disease, and happier and fitter people,” says Bertrand Lefort from the Cyclopath team. Already a passionate cyclist, he confesses that if it wasn’t for the challenge, he would have driven his car when the weather was bad or when he was feeling tired. Result: 1188 kilometres in one month and some attractive savings on fuel.

This year’s Bike to work campaign mobilised 64 680 participants from 2 114 organisations and companies across Switzerland. Just one month of cycling stopped about 2 300 tonnes of CO₂ from polluting the air. And the numbers are increasing each year. CERN is positioned, as always, near the top of the list — fourth overall in terms of the number of participants, but first in its category in terms of the percentage participating. More great news: the CERN team “Doodle17” won first prize — a tour around Switzerland — in the prize draw.

Keep on rolling for the rest of the year with the Bike to CERN challenge. Sign up now  here. And most importantly, stay safe!

Since the last LHC Report, the LHC has gone through a period of Machine Development (MD), a four-day technical stop, a technical stop recovery and a series of special physics runs.

The first technical stop of 2018 started on Monday, 18 June, when the last MD beam was dumped at 6.00 a.m. Many teams were ready to access the accelerator for the 300 maintenance and repair activities declared in the IMPACT tool. For the technical stop, nearly the entire machine was kept under operational cryogenic conditions, allowing a short stop and a potentially quick restart. The number of people in the tunnel reached almost 190 on Wednesday morning. At the end of the afternoon on Thursday, 21 June, the machine was handed back to the Operations team for the restart.

The technical stop recovery was, unfortunately, not as smooth as anticipated due to some technical issues, but the activities to prepare for the special physics runs were nevertheless able to start on Sunday, 24 June. Two types of special physics runs were planned: the van der Meer scans that allow the experiments to make an absolute measurement of the luminosity, and the b^*= 90 m run, for which the beams are not squeezed to their usual b^*of 30 cm but de-squeezed so that the particles collide under shallow angles, as required for the Roman Pots experiments, TOTEM and ALPHA.

For these special physics runs, three different configurations were required and each of them needed to be validated. This validation mainly concerned machine safety and consisted of the production of loss maps in order to verify that losses in the transverse and longitudinal planes are correctly absorbed by the different collimator systems. A total of 77 loss maps were generated and measured, requiring 14 cycles from injection through acceleration and into collisions. This is a time-consuming activity, the results of which are evaluated and, if deemed correct, formally validated by experts. Unfortunately, the whole programme was delayed by four days due to technical issues but also due to the complexity of the programme itself. Nevertheless, on Saturday, 6 July, the programme was successfully completed and the LHC reverted to production mode for standard 25 ns physics.

In the coming days, the LHC should reach the integrated luminosity target of 150 fb^-1, set for Run 1 and Run 2 combined. With only 2.6 fb^-1to go, this goal is very near. However, this does not mean that the LHC will be stopped soon. The next challenge will be to reach the goal set for 2018: 60 fb^-1. All the teams around the LHC are fully committed to continuing the hard work and reaching this goal before early December.