From its first issue in 1959 to today, the CERN Courier magazine has gone through several transformations. Now is the time to help shape its future. (Image: Cristina Agrigoroae/CERN)
First published in August 1959, the CERN Courier continues to keep the international high-energy physics community informed of the latest developments across the field. The Courier seeks not just to report news, but also to offer researchers an opportunity to share their research for the benefit of the field as a whole.
A glance through the magazine’s back catalogue is a journey through the rise of the Standard Model of particle physics, the growing connections between particle physics and cosmology/astrophysics, the increasing scale and complexity of accelerators, detectors and computing, and the shift from small to international collaborations involving thousands of people. Today, in this large and complex landscape, and as physicists work out how best to explore the world beyond the Standard Model, communication is as important as ever.
That’s why we are making changes to the CERN Courier website, in a first step towards a more dynamic online presence. The fully revamped site is set to launch in 2019.
To help guide the Courier’s evolution, both in print and online, and for the chance to win some CERN merchandise, you’re invited to give feedback via an online survey. The survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete and will close at the end of August 2018.
Give your feedback via this online survey to help guide CERN Courier’s evolution
Do you like listening to music while you work? What about watching videos during your leisure time at CERN? Sure this is fun. Having your colleagues participate in this is even more fun. However, this fun is usually not for free. There are artists and the music and movie companies who earn their living from music and videos.
Thus, if you want to listen to music or watch movies at CERN, make sure that you own the proper rights to do so (and that you have the agreement of your supervisor to do this during working hours). Note that these rights are personal: you usually do not have the right to share music or videos with third parties without violating copyrights. Therefore, making copyrighted music and videos public, or sharing music and videos as well as other copyrighted material, is forbidden at CERN. It violates the CERN Computing Rules and it contradicts CERN's Code of Conduct, which expects each of us to behave ethically and honestly, and to credit others for their contribution. Copyright violation is also illegal in different ways in different European and other countries, including in CERN’s two host states.
Violating copyright is not a trivial offense. Sharing music or videos via the CERN network or from CERN computers will reflect back on the Organization and shed a bad light on all of us. Therefore, help keep CERN's reputation and integrity protected. Respect copyright! Users violating these rules may face serious consequences, including the involvement of their supervisor and, if applicable, the payment of any (financial) compensation as CERN will decline any costs of the infraction.
The “Nature et abeilles” club maintains a dozen beehives and compiles inventories of the flora and insects on the CERN sites. (Image: Julien Ordan, Anna Mestvirishvili/CERN)
Admittedly, the CERN sites seem nothing like the green and grass-laden campuses that students dream about. Visitors are immediately struck by the almost-brutalist industrial edifices, car-parks and roads. And yet, in the midst of the metal and the tarmac, nature still has a firm foothold. Look closely and you will spy green enclaves and an unexpected variety of fauna and flora, lovingly maintained by the team responsible for parks maintenance at CERN. Believe it or not, parks and woodlands account for 100 hectares out of the 211 hectares of land within CERN’s fences.
If you’re still in doubt, then come with us on a tour of the Laboratory’s green back-office.
CERN’s sites, and more especially the Meyrin and Prévessin sites, are dotted with islands of greenery that are home to typical dry grassland flora, in particular a remarkably diverse population of wild orchids. CERN thus has the widest variety of orchid species in the Geneva region. Their names testify to their particular flowering processes and evocative forms, such as the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera), the man orchid (Orchis antropophora), or the monkey orchid (Orchis simia). But the most numerous species, and the most recognisable in bright pink, is the pyramidal orchid (Anacampsis pyramidalis).
Flowering from May onwards, the pyramidal orchid is the most prolific of the orchids growing at CERN. (Image: Pauline Albert/CERN)
“These orchids are a precious asset in CERNs grasslands,” explains CERN parks manager, Mathieu Fontaine. “For conservation reasons, we have a sustainable management policy that includes late cutting.”
CERN boasts many species of trees, but in recent years, dozens of poplars have had to be felled. Most were planted about forty years ago and were reaching the end of their lives. As this happens they become dangerous, their roots invading underground water and electricity networks. The time for re-planting has arrived. “Next winter we will be planting about 90 saplings on the Swiss part of the Meyrin site,” says Mathieu Fontaine. “Further planting campaigns are planned in subsequent years in order to replenish CERN’s tree population.”
CERN is also committed to biodiversity and nature conservation in the land just beyond its fences. France and Switzerland have lent CERN a number of parcels, amounting to 415 hectares, which not yet been given over to science and constitute the unfenced site of the Organization. This includes about 300 hectares of agricultural land leased to farmers and 90 hectares of woods. CERN has undertaken to manage these tracts on behalf of its Host States. The Laboratory is thus helping to support agriculture in the Pays de Gex, which has seen rampant urbanisation over the past 20 years, and contributing to the preservation of the region’s last lowland forests. That’s great news for the biodiversity, rural life and people in the Pays de Gex, who can continue to enjoy these unspoilt areas.
One of the spectacular poplar-felling campaigns. These trees are about forty years old. Often weakened by mistletoe (as in the photo), they have become a hazard for CERN’s installations. (Image: Erwan Le Marrec, ONF)
CERN’s woodlands are brimming with local varieties such as oak, ash, wild cherry, hornbeam, aspen, poplar, and common alder, managed and operated by the French national forestry commission, Office national des forêts (ONF). “These tracts are managed in the same way as regular high forests, with holes made to allow natural regeneration,” CERN’s park warden, Erwan Le Marrec, explains. For a number of years, horses have been used to remove the felled trees, thus minimising the impact on the environment.
The timber from the commercial operation of the forests or from the felling of ageing trees (poplars) is either used for wood energy, to heat public buildings in the Pays de Gex, or sent to local sawmills and made into items like pallets.
On the fauna side, CERN’s famous sheep have now started grazing CERN’s pastures, as they do every year. Starting at Point 1 behind the Globe, they will spend the whole summer ambling from one meadow to the next, their bells tinkling within earshot of our offices and laboratories.
Every summer, CERN’s fields are kept tidy by a flock of sheep. An air of the countryside, with the tinkling of bells, can be heard amid the concrete and metal of CERN’s buildings. (Image: Noemi Caraban/CERN)
The Prévessin site has other surprises in store for the nature enthusiasts among us. Take a stroll to the end of Route Heisenberg and behold the bees ! Every ten days, members of the CERN club “Nature et Abeilles” look after the dozen beehives there. This year, the first spring harvest produced about 120 kilograms of honey. A second harvest is planned for the end of July.
The “Nature et Abeilles” club looks after a dozen beehives which have already produced 120 kg of honey in the spring, with more to come in the summer. An excellent harvest ! (Image: Julien Ordan, Anna Mestvirishvili/CERN)
The “Nature et Abeilles” club is also involved in nature conservation activities. For example, it regularly draws up floristic and entomological inventories on CERN’s various plots, aimed at gaining a better understanding of the sites’ fauna and flora and taking appropriate action whenever necesary.
CERN’s parks and woodlands offer an attractive environment for rich biodiversity. Make the most of them and share your experiences with everyone by sending your photos and stories to internal.communication@cern.ch
The summer students from non Member States benefit from a 2 months training programme thanks to the CERN & Society foundation and its donors. (Image: Noemi Caraban/CERN)
Summer is upon us, and while many are preparing for their holidays, at CERN this is the busiest time of the year.
From June until August, the CERN campus will be swarming with summer students from all over the world, keen to spend this season of rest learning and working alongside scientists and fellow students. Most of them had arrived by the end of June and will spend eight to ten weeks going from lectures to workshops and getting hands-on experience with physics, computing and engineering. This year, 62 students will benefit from this unique learning opportunity thanks to a long list of generous CERN & Society donors including the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, a US-based private foundation and the Julius Baer bank.
CERN & Society’s work does not end here. A remarkable donation by Strangeworks has made possible an exciting internship programme in entrepreneurship, taking place for the first time this year. The CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme will welcome its first interns in August. For five weeks, ten master’s-level students will delve into the world of innovation as well as technology and knowledge transfer, all fields of CERN excellence, guided by CERN experts.
In September, we will welcome the 2018 winners of the CERN Beamline for Schools competition. Two high-school teams, from India and the Philippines, will transform their scientific experiments and ideas into reality. These teams were selected from among the 195 that participated in the competition this year, representing a total of 1535 students getting engaged with science. This year’s competition was made possible thanks to a donation by the Arconic Foundation, with additional contributions from the Motorola Solutions Foundation and Amgen Inc., as well as from the Ernest Solvay Fund, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation.
We look forward to welcoming all of them to CERN! They are the future of science and we are grateful to our partners for making all this possible.
If you would like to learn more about CERN & Society and how you can make a difference in the lives of young people, visit our website.
Fun physics workshop during Science Night on 7 July: children observe the lines created by magnetic fields. (Image: Loraine Massarotti/CERN)
Each summer, CERN goes out to meet the general public, offering visitors a refreshing science cocktail. This year, the summer events began at the end of June with the CineGlobe international film festival. On the theme of “Intelligent futures”, the festival explored the world of artificial intelligence. The festival ended with film screenings during the Science Night event, which took place in the Perle du Lac park in Geneva on 7 and 8 July.
It was the 12th year of the Science Night event, organised by the Science History Museum, and a team of 20 volunteers ran a CERN stand entitled “A world of pARTicles”. Young and old alike were able to discover the fundamental principles of physics through entertaining activities: fun physics workshops, drawing activities and virtual reality headsets.
For its next public event, CERN will be the guest of honour at the Swiss National Day celebrations organised by the City of Geneva in the La Grange park on 1 August.
Visitors will be able to discover CERN’s work through a varied programme of activities – fun physics experiments, the “Drole de physique” show, virtual reality headsets, film screenings, and robot and programming workshops. Come and see us from 1.00 p.m. onwards!
We still need volunteers to run the robot and programming workshops: sign up here! (See in the Announcements)
Have you ever heard about the “Broken Windows Theory” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory)? It was introduced in 1982 by social scientists and suggests that serious crime and anti-social behaviour is more likely in environments where small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking and turnstile-jumping have already created an atmosphere of lawlessness. The city of New York adopted the theory, with the hope of reducing crime by creating a more positive urban environment, leading to order and lawfulness. We should try to apply the same theory to running computing services visible to the Internet.
Computing services at CERN are run by a large variety of people, but primarily by our colleagues from the IT department. On top of their service offerings, users can create web services with openings to the Internet. In parallel, our research community, the experiments and the accelerator sector independently run computing services, which themselves have openings to the Internet. While the Computer Security Team controls the openings in CERN’s outer perimeter firewall and performs an assessment on the level of security before any new opening is permitted, it is currently quite tiresome to maintain that security level for all open services. On the one hand, “computer security” is a highly dynamic subject and what was secure yesterday might become insecure tomorrow (think of the “Shellshock” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)) or “POODLE” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POODLE ) vulnerabilities of the past). On the other hand, thanks to the motto “don’t touch a running system”, negligence leads to a deteriorated state of open services.
Recent computer security scans have shed some sinister light on those CERN computer services exposed to the Internet. Not all of them are perfectly secure anymore. Certificates have expired or are just “random” (e.g. self-signed or without chain-of-trust), encrypted channels use methods that are now deemed to be insecure, landing pages are missing or software is not up-to-date anymore. All owners of the affected services have, of course, been notified!
But still, like in New York, deteriorated services might attract malicious evil-doers to carry out their malicious deeds. Let’s keep our Internet presence secure and professional! Let’s apply New York City methods! We already scan for vulnerable websites and outdated configurations, we already check whether current firewall openings are still needed and we notify the owners of affected services, but we need to do more! On the one hand, we should look into adapting the defaults for centrally managed services in order to have an elevated and more secure base configuration. On the other hand, we would like to ask all owners of computing services, in particular where running that service is not your primary occupation, to keep a closer eye on them. Don’t let them deteriorate! Keep them up-to-date and verify regularly that all versions are the most recent ones. Check your certificates and renew them in time. Have a landing page or, if not possible, redirect to “home.cern”. And, finally, review all firewall openings and ask us to close them if they are not needed anymore. Let’s keep our Digital Broken Windows under control.
Renovation of the East Experiment Area of the Proton Synchrotron (PS) (Image: CERN)
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.
ATTRACT’s objective is to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem for the breakthrough technologies in detection and imaging that are needed for fundamental research, as well as to create societal impact through those technologies.
How? As a first step, by providing 100 kEUR seed funding to 170 selected projects that demonstrate the potential of breakthrough technologies in detection and imaging. This initial 17 MEUR fund is solely targeting High-Risk High-Gain concepts that address this cross-cutting field of research and applications.
The ATTRACT Consortium is composed of CERN, ESO, ESRF, EMBL, European XFEL, ILL, Aalto University, ESADE Business School and EIRMA. The project is financed by the EC under the H2020 programme.
CERN can benefit greatly from ATTRACT as it offers an opportunity for the Laboratory’s diverse scientific and technical communities to find the necessary resources to develop disruptive new ideas in detection and imaging.
To select these 170 promising ideas, a three-month Open Call was launched on 1 August for organisations to submit proposals. All relevant information about the Call can be found here.
CERN colleagues need to submit an EDH form before the deadline of 17 September as part of the standard CERN procedure that must be followed before submitting proposals for EU projects.
The link above also includes a list of the members of the ad hoc CERN Working Group reviewing the proposals where CERN is involved as a potential partner or coordinator. Approaching the members of this group first might be a good initial step if you are intending to apply.
LHC Page 1 announcing the run with “partially stripped ions” in the LHC.
The LHC has just come out of a successful week of machine development (MD). At all of CERN’s machines, MD periods are used to carry out studies covering a wide spectrum of topics. The studies that were carried out at the LHC concerned current issues, as well as tests of future configurations for LHC Run 3 (2021–2023) and the High-Luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC). Looking further into the future, some tests were performed in view of the Future Circular Collider for hadrons (FCC-hh) and of the Physics Beyond Colliders studies.
The heat load generated by the beams and deposited on the surface of the vacuum chamber, thought to be due to clouds of electrons generated by the closely spaced bunches inside the LHC, is one of the performance limitations of the LHC. The heat must be extracted by the cryogenic system, which has a limited capacity. Some of the LHC arcs (also called sectors) generate more than twice as much heat as the best arcs, a mystery that has not yet been understood. During this MD period, the heat load was measured carefully as a function of the beam intensity in order to compare it with models. It was also measured with single beams present in the LHC to disentangle the contributions of the two vacuum chambers to the heat load.
This plot shows the heat load in each of the eight arcs of the LHC (in watts per 100 metres of the LHC ring). The heat load is measured in the presence of just one of the two beams, or with both beams in the accelerator. Both beams contribute equally to the heat generation. There are four good arcs (in sectors 34, 45, 56 and 67) with a low heat load, while the remaining arcs reach heat loads of up to two times higher. (Image: Giovanni Ladarola/CERN)
Looking further into the future, the Achromatic Telescopic Squeezing (ATS) optics currently in use were tested in new configurations that might provide baselines for operation during LHC Run 3. One option boosts the efficiency of the LHC octupole magnets, which play a crucial role in stabilising high-intensity beams. With the number of protons per bunch expected to increase by around 50% in Run 3, from around 120 billion per bunch to 170 billion per bunch, the tested configuration could become an important ingredient in controlling the intense Run 3 beams provided by the LHC injectors.
Within the framework of the Physics Beyond Colliders study, another test saw lead ions with one remaining electron attached to each nucleus successfully accelerated up to an energy of 6.5 TeV. Usually lead ions accelerated in the LHC are stripped of all their electrons (the last electrons are stripped off in a foil installed between the PS and the SPS); in this case, the foil thickness was tuned to retain one last electron. These “partially stripped ions” (PSI) must first be injected and accelerated in the SPS before they can be captured in the LHC. Because the remaining electron is easily stripped off by interaction with gas molecules, the lifetime of such beams depends critically on the vacuum conditions. Thanks to the excellent vacuum condition in the LHC, an ample lifetime of 40 hours was measured during the test. If the PSI are made to interact with a laser beam of the appropriate energy, the electron can absorb a photon and later re-emit it. In this process, the emitted photon energy is boosted by the large momentum of the ions in the LHC, yielding a beam of high-energy gamma rays. This is the concept of a gamma factory, which passed its first hurdle during this MD week.
From 11 to 13 July, CERN was swarming with table football enthusiasts, who had signed up for the first charitable tournament organised by the CERN Table Football Club (CTFC) and the CERN & Society Foundation.
Twenty-eight teams competed vigorously through several qualification matches, with the Italian ‘Afterlunch FC’ winning the tournament on 12 July. A constant stream of people, including many who came along to cheer for their friends, crowded around the three tables set up for the tournament.
The CTFC was founded by a group of young table football enthusiasts in 2017 and welcomes all who enjoy this game. For them, this is a way of bringing people together in a fun and easy-going environment, following CERN’s paradigm of uniting people from all around the world in the name of scientific collaboration and advancement.
Participants in this tournament not only had fun but also played for a good cause. All proceeds went to the CERN & Society Foundation in support of its education and outreach projects, and will help younger generations of scientists and engineers reach their potential.
Many thanks to the CTFC for collaborating with us! A big thank you also to all those who took part in this tournament and helped nurture the scientists of tomorrow!
On 1 August 2018, CERN was the City of Geneva’s guest of honour at the Swiss National Day celebrations at Parc La Grange.
CERN’s tent, which offered workshops, virtual reality tours, physics demonstrations, educational games and the new "Particle Identities" quiz, was never empty from 1 p.m. to 8.30 p.m., giving many thousands of visitors the opportunity to learn about CERN’s activities.
From the youngest to the oldest, experts to novices, a hugely diverse audience enjoyed these events. The CERN tent, offering workshops, virtual reality tours, physics demonstrations, educational games and the new “Particle Identities” quiz, was never empty from 1 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. Many thousands of visitors had the opportunity to learn about CERN’s activities. The events were enjoyed by young and old, experts and novices – in short, a hugely diverse audience.
The theme of Mayor Sami Kanaan’s mandate, "Challenges in digitalisation", was the inspiration for many of the events organised by CERN, which, as the birthplace of the World Wide Web, has long been a key voice on that theme. Genevans learned how to program computers and robots at two continuous workshops. They also visited the CERN Data Centre, a living monument to the digital age, using virtual reality headsets.
Nearly forty CERN volunteers represented their laboratory with panache, perfectly adapting their explanations of their daily activities to the general public. From analysis of particle collisions through a "Connect the dots" activity to "fun with physics" demonstrations featuring the properties of magnets and vacuum bells, and ATLAS experiment colouring for the little ones, the events were a dazzling blend of entertainment and science outreach!
The mechanical structure of the New Small Wheel (Image: CERN)
To continue exploring the frontiers of particle physics following the discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC experiments are preparing to enter a new era: a major upgrade to the LHC, known as the High-Luminosity LHC, is scheduled to come online in 2026. It will increase the luminosity of the collider, delivering more collisions and allowing the experiments to probe phenomena that are even rarer in nature.
At these higher collision rates, the detectors will see a larger number of particles flying through them than at present. Indeed, at the HL-LHC, the trigger rates for single muons in the ATLAS detector will go beyond what can be handled by the present equipment. Brand new components — from chambers for particle detection to complex support structures, services and new electronics — will prepare the detector to meet the demands of research at the high-luminosity frontier.
29 February 2008: One of the current small wheels is lowered down the 100-metre shaft into the ATLAS cavern. The current small wheels will be replaced by the New Small Wheels as part of the Phase-I upgrade of ATLAS. (Image: CERN)
The ATLAS collaboration has taken a major step towards preparations for this phase with the completion of the two mechanical support discs for its New Small Wheel (NSW) upgrade, which were unveiled recently in Building 191 when the scaffolding used during their assembly was removed. This upgrade project targets completion over the course of the second Long Shutdown of the LHC, in 2019 and 2020.
This was a milestone for the NSW project, which involves the replacement of the innermost sections of the ATLAS end-cap muon-detection system. The newly unveiled mechanical structures will support the full system, which will weigh over 100 tonnes. Not only will this mechanical structure support the particle detector chambers, it will also provide both radiation shielding and the flux return for the ATLAS solenoid.
The support structure on which the final
wedge-shaped chambers will be mounted.
(GIF: Cristina Agrigoroae/CERN)
Furthermore, new detector technologies will be installed, namely the Micromegas chambers and the Small Strip Thin Gap Chambers (STGC). These detectors are being built in institutes all over the world — in five different countries for each — and will be mounted on the wheels at CERN before being lowered into the ATLAS cavern. The two wheels, resembling a pie-shaped object, will then be placed on both side A and side C of the ATLAS detector.
“One of the biggest achievements — and what surprises me again and again in this project — is how so many activities from different countries around the world have been brought together seamlessly at CERN,” says Stephanie Zimmermann, project leader for the NSW upgrade of ATLAS.
The New Small Wheels will allow much more stringent selection criteria for muons and provide new detector technology to handle the high backgrounds and high pile-up rates — the two main requirements for the High-Luminosity LHC.
Meet Jamie, a Mechanical Engineering Technician at CERN who's working on the ATLAS experiment.
Money has always been a catalyst for greed and malice. Blackmail is one way to extort money from the innocent and has existed since ancient times. In the digital world, blackmail is not unknown and there are many ways to go about it. We have discussed some of them in previous Bulletin articles (“Malware, ransomware, doxware and the like”). Recently, there has been a clever new twist on an old e-mail scam that might make the con far more believable.
A message received at CERN or elsewhere claims that your computer has been compromised and the attacker has full access to your device. This is not beyond the realms of possibility as computers always have some vulnerabilities that haven’t been fixed yet (by you or the developer of the operating system). And “full access” really implies full access: to the documents stored on that device like photos, videos, bank statements; to the buffer of its keyboard so that every keystroke – including any passwords being typed – can be logged and stolen; to its screen and whatever is displayed on it snapshotted by the attacker; and to the attached microphone and web camera. In the last case, this allows the attacker to spy on any activity committed in the vicinity of that computer (see also our Bulletin article “Curiosity clicks the link”). And the attacker can play dirty tricks with that power. By claiming to have a recording of the webcam’s livestream while the computer was accessing webpages with pornographic material, the attacker can threaten to release the video to all locally registered contacts unless a Bitcoin ransom is paid… The new twist? The e-mail does not only include this threat but also now references a real password previously tied to the recipient’s e-mail address, which makes the scam much more believable!!!
How come? Passwords are a necessary token for protecting your data in any web service. CERN INDICO, CERN EDH, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Hence, they are usually stored in combination with an identifier (i.e. your e-mail address) for that web service – but not always in a perfectly secure fashion. At CERN, we protect your password in accordance with best practice, converting it into a non-recoverable string (technically a “salted hash”), but some other sites might store your password in clear text. If those websites are infiltrated, all clear text passwords are exposed and the access protection for any other data is completely lost. From that moment, all data can be considered to be involuntarily public. This is happening more often than you might think. Whenever the CERN Computer Security Team learns about newly exposed passwords linked to your CERN e-mail address or any other address registered with CERN, we will let you know!
Thus, if you receive such a scam e-mail blackmailing you, please DON’T PANIC. And for sure, do not pay any ransom money! The only thing you should do is to change the password revealed in the e-mail – if you recognise where it was used. Consider terminating that specific account. To be more proactive, recall these simple principles to keep your digital life secure: keep all your devices always up-to-date by using the operating system’s auto-update feature (““WannaCry”? The importance of being patched”); choose complex and/or long passwords and keep them to yourself (“CERN Secure Password Competition…”); have different passwords for different sites and different purposes; and do not click on links in e-mails or on webpages whose origin you don’t trust or which look dodgy (“A free click for your awareness”)!
The final part of the AWAKE experimental facility, with the accelerating plasma cell and the scintillating screen used to detect the accelerated electrons and infer their energy. (Image: Maximilien Brice, Julien Ordan/CERN)
Early in the morning on Saturday, 26 May 2018, the AWAKE collaboration at CERN successfully accelerated electrons for the first time using a wakefield generated by protons zipping through a plasma. A paper describing this important result was published in the journal Nature on 29 August. The electrons were accelerated by a factor of around 100 over a length of 10 metres: injected at an energy of around 19 MeV, they reached an energy of almost 2 GeV.
AWAKE (“Advanced WAKEfield Experiment”) is a proof-of-principle R&D project investigating the use of protons to drive plasma wakefields for accelerating electrons. While traditional accelerators use radio-frequency cavities, in wakefield accelerators, the particles get accelerated by “surfing” on top of a plasma wave (or wakefield).
“Wakefield accelerators have two different beams: the beam of particles that is the target for the acceleration, known as ‘witness beam’, and the beam that generates the wakefield, known as the ‘drive beam’,” explains Allen Caldwell, spokesperson of the AWAKE collaboration. Previous examples of wakefield acceleration have relied on using electrons or lasers for the drive beam. AWAKE is the first experiment to use protons for the drive beam. “Wakefield accelerators relying on protons for their drive beams can accelerate their witness beams for a greater distance, consequently allowing them to attain higher energies,” adds Caldwell.
Drive-protons from the SPS are injected into AWAKE’s plasma cell containing vaporised Rubidium. A laser pulse transforms the Rubidium gas into a plasma by ejecting electrons from the gas atoms. As the drive beam of positively charged protons travels through the plasma, it causes the negatively charged electrons within the plasma to oscillate in a wavelike pattern, much like a ship moving through the water generates oscillations in its wake. Witness-electrons are then injected and “ride” the plasma wave to get accelerated.
“AWAKE has demonstrated that it can achieve an average gradient of around 200 MV/m,” says Edda Gschwendtner, technical coordinator and CERN project leader for AWAKE. By comparison, the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), which operated between 1989 and 2000, had a nominal acceleration gradient of 6 MV/m. Gschwendtner and colleagues are aiming to attain an eventual acceleration gradient of around 1000 MV/m (or 1 GV/m).
AWAKE will continue testing the wakefield-acceleration of electrons for the rest of 2018. “We are looking forward to obtaining more results from our experiment to demonstrate the scope of plasma wakefields as the basis for future particle accelerators,” explains Edda Gschwendtner. Although still at a very early stage of development, the use of plasma wakefields could drastically reduce the sizes, and therefore the costs, of the accelerators.
CERN project leader for AWAKE, Edda Gschwendtner, explains how the experiment accelerated electrons for the first time (Video: CERN)
Six years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, ATLAS and CMS have announced that they have observed its decay into bottom quarks. The result was presented on 28 August at CERN by the two collaborations.
The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that about 60% of the time a Higgs boson will decay to a pair of bottom quarks, the second-heaviest of the six flavours of quarks. Testing this prediction is crucial because the result would either lend support to the Standard Model or rock its foundations and point to new physics.
Spotting this common Higgs-boson decay channel is anything but easy, as the six-year period since the discovery of the boson has shown. The reason for the difficulty is that there are many other ways of producing bottom quarks in proton–proton collisions. This makes it hard to isolate the Higgs-boson decay signal from the background “noise” associated with such processes. By contrast, the less-common Higgs-boson decay channels that were observed at the time of discovery of the particle, such as the decay to a pair of photons, are much easier to extract from the background.
To extract the signal, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations each combined data from the first and second runs of the LHC. They then applied complex analysis methods to the data.
Since the recovery from the five-day machine development (MD) period that started on 23 July, the LHC has been in luminosity production mode, crawling its way up the predicted luminosity curve with the aim of attaining the 2018 goal of 60 fb-1. The period of luminosity production will be interrupted by another block of MD and a second technical stop, starting on 12 September. The machine should then be back in production on Monday, 24 September, which coincides with the CERN Council week, by which time we aim to have passed the 50 fb-1mark. Another four weeks of production before the switch to the Pb ion run should then be enough to reach the goal of 60 fb-1.
The final two quarters of beam production before LS2, with the next MD and technical stop block in weeks 37 and 38, a week of special physics runs as a placeholder in week 41 – although this remains to be definitively scheduled – and the end of the proton physics run scheduled for 27 October.
The last few weeks have unfortunately not been trouble free, as the injectors have suffered from a series of issues that have caused prolonged periods of beam unavailability. Not all of the unavailability translates directly into downtime for the LHC as, in some cases, fills can be maintained until the injectors are available again.
The breakdown of an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) in the PS complex at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, 15 August was a good example of this. The LHC was in stable beams when many front-end computers (FEC) in the PS complex stopped working due to the UPS breakdown, making beam production impossible. Although the actual UPS issue lasted only 4 seconds, it took 12 hours to fully recover the machines and to resume beam production. The LHC managed to bridge the entire period with a fill that lasted 26.5 hours, which is long, but nevertheless a good 10 hours short of the record fill length.
However, the next day a serious water leak was found in one of the 100 main PS magnets. Unfortunately, the LHC did not manage to fill before the leak occurred and was therefore without beam for the 22 hours it took to repair it.
Not long after, at around 5 p.m. on Monday, 20 August, the LHC had dumped the beam to re-fill when, at nearly the same time, beam-induced losses in the SPS caused a vacuum leak in one of the main bending magnets in sextant 3 of the accelerator, preventing any production of beam out of the SPS. After investigation, the magnet had to be replaced and, since the system had been at ambient pressure for some time, prolonged pumping and conditioning with beam were required before the usual 144-bunch trains could be produced again for the LHC.
The LHC team did not sit idle, but used the downtime well by getting many of the interventions requiring accesses that were on the waiting list done. Once that had been completed, they switched to setting up the ion cycle in anticipation of the Pb ion run that starts on 4 November. Initially, this cycle was set up without a beam, but as soon as the SPS could deliver single bunches, which was at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, 22 August, these were used to validate part of the cycle. By the time the 144-bunch train was available from the SPS, which was at around noon on Thursday, 23 August, substantial progress had been made on the set-up and an efficient switch was made back to the proton cycle to resume luminosity production.
Since this last issue, the injectors have had very good availability and the LHC has managed to fill when necessary. Despite all the issues mentioned above, close to 18 fb-1have been integrated since the recovery after the last MD block on Saturday, 28 July. This is an average of 3.6 fb-1per week, with 4.6 fb-1attained during the last week. Therefore, accumulating 2.1 fb-1in the coming week to reach the 50 fb-1before the MD and technical stop period should be feasible, provided no serious issues loom on the horizon.
Multi-annual overview of integrated luminosity, with 2018 well on track to become a record year for the LHC.
Following up on some questions we received concerning our last Bulletin article (“An old scam in a new disguise”), let us expand on the easiest way to lose your CERN password… just reuse it on insecure web services outside CERN!
Passwords are a necessary token for protecting your data in any web service: CERN INDICO, CERN EDH, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. During registration, passwords are usually stored in combination with an identifier (i.e. your e-mail address) for that web service, and later on requested during the login (“authentication”) process in order to verify your identity. At CERN, this is managed through the CERN identity management system and CERN Single Sign-On (“CERN SSO”). This provides a handy way to get you logged into any CERN web and computing services. And as all CERN computing services are required to use this central solution, all you need to remember is just one password and not a plethora of unique passwords. The CERN SSO portal then protects your password in accordance with best practice and converts it into a non-recoverable string (technically a “salted hash”). Of course, as the access possible with such a CERN password is wide-ranging, a number of due-diligence requirements are applied with respect to password length and complexity as well as expiry date (see our Bulletin article on “Brain Power vs. Password Managers”). In certain circumstances, e.g. when accessing critical services, the CERN SSO might even require you to provide a second authentication factor (besides the password you “know”, a token you “have” – like the “calculator” used for some Internet banking services).
But it is not always guaranteed that other web service providers will apply similar due diligence… “Security” might not be their core business. Passwords might not be given the necessary attention but just be stored weakly encrypted or even in plain text without any further protection. If those websites are infiltrated, all clear text passwords are exposed and the access protection to any other data is completely lost. From that moment, all data can be considered to be involuntarily public. This is happening more often than you might think. The reliable and trusty website haveibeenpwned.com/ provides a long list of compromised websites that have already lost their data. Feel free to enter your private or CERN e-mail address. You might be surprised.
But you shouldn’t be. The CERN Computer Security Team has subscribed to the “';--have i been pwned?” web service as well as to several others. Through them, and through our network of peers from other computer security teams, from academia, industry and security companies, as well as from national authorities and law enforcement agencies, we usually learn in advance of newly published “password dumps” (i.e. lists of e-mail addresses and clear-text passwords linked to a particular web service). Our automatic mechanisms analyse those dumps and identify entries linked to your CERN e-mail address or any e-mail address you have registered with CERN (e.g. with your lightweight account, or an e-mail address used to forward mails to). This allows us to inform you in a timely manner that your external password has been disclosed. Time for you to change that password or to consider terminating that account completely. Similarly, we process those password dumps in order to identify exposed passwords and e-mail addresses linked to sites of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (the WLCG), other affiliated universities and institutes, some of the Geneva-based international organisations, and even some Swiss companies. The corresponding computer security teams are informed of all necessary details. A partnership at its best…
LHCreate is a hackathon that brings together creative people from CERN as well as students from IPAC Design Genève to work together. The 2018 edition is organised by the CMS, ATLAS and ALICE experiments and will challenge participants to build prototype exhibits that are fun, creative, and reproducible by students from twelve to sixteen years old to give them a taste of what we do at CERN every day.
Four teams of contestants will have two days to design and build the prototypes. Participants will have the chance to collaborate with external actors, as teams will mix four CERN-affiliated people with two student designers from the Geneva IPAC design school. IdeaSquare’s labs and workshops will be made available and a large supply of components and material will also be in place for the construction of the exhibits.
Professionals in the fields of physics, product design, communication and teaching will be there to advise the teams. A panel of four judges will then select the winning team according to the following criteria:
· Scientific content: 30%
· Suitability for the classroom (including size): 30%
· Product design: 30%
· Reproducibility: 10%
After two days of fun, work and free pizza, the teams will present their prototypes during an evening public event at the Globe, in front of the panel of judges and members of the public. Prizes include ski passes, restaurant vouchers, spa treatments and tickets for the TEDxCERN 2018. The winning exhibit will be displayed at CERN for visitors. The specifications will be made available to all interested schools so they can build their own version.
If you have a creative mind, a taste for teamwork and challenges, join us!
For the third consecutive year, CERN and its partners Lancaster University and the Institute of Physics, ran their popular Physics Pavilion at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival near Bristol (UK).
Since the huge success of the first year, WOMAD provided two additional new spaces – The Lab and the gazebo. The Lab offers hands-on ticketed workshops with new activities like the art of Science Rap, Programming a Humanoid Robot and the Physics of Gin. The gazebo proposes all day drop-in activities, with girls from Badminton School serving up interactive fun, and CERN Virtual Reality proving extremely popular.
CERN’s Thierry Stora, Jasper Kirkby and Simon Baird gave engaging talks about MEDICIS, CLOUD and CERN’s Accelerator System. And this year, a NASA collaboration brought a live link to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, where Hubble telescope operations were explained to the audience.
New this time: CERN had a ‘Build an Accelerator’ workshop where participants could build a brand new device created in collaboration with Devoxx4kids and the HIDIOT in the UK, allowing them to solder and program a mini accelerator which shoots ‘particles’ around and even creates ‘collisions’. Many thanks to the IT department for the loan of 16 laptops!
This year, the Physics Pavilion also hosted the first CERN Alumni event in the UK. Those present enjoyed talks from Mike Large, physics graduate and Chief Operating Officer of the Real World and WOMAD groups and CERN Alumnus Spyridon Papadopoulos (who launched the new CERN Alumni London group at the event). The talks were followed by a networking drink which allowed alumni to (re)connect, debate subjects brought up during the talks as well as provide their ideas for the CERN Alumni Network.
If you have any ideas for talks or workshops at WOMAD or would just like to hear more, please contact connie.potter@cern.ch
On Friday 28 September 2018, the curious of all ages will come together for Researchers’ Night at CERN, a fun and free event in both French and English.
The world’s biggest particle physics laboratory will once again open its doors for this great European celebration of science, now in its ninth year. From 5 p.m. until 11 p.m., there will be plenty to see and do in the area around the brand new Esplanade des Particules, which will be hosting an event for the general public for the first time. Visitors will have the opportunity to take part in a wide range of activities, from robotics and cloud chamber workshops to Synchrocyclotron visits, virtual reality headsets, physics demonstrations and presentations of laboratory experiments.
In the Globe of Science and Innovation, you will be able to watch screenings of some of the latest scientific films, including Science in Exile and Matière grise: recherches farfelues. The screening of the most recent feature film about CERN, Almost Nothing: CERN Experimental City, will bring the evening to a close. This documentary was recently awarded a prize at the international documentary film festival “Visions du Réel” in Nyon and the film’s director, Anna de Manincor, will be there to answer your questions.
Three Researchers’ Night food trucks will be open for business from midday on the Esplanade des Particules. So, why not treat yourself to lunch!
Unable to come to CERN? Stream the event on Facebook Live as it happens and let CERN researchers make your night unforgettable.
