The last month carried a lucky spell for the members of ISOLDE's EC-SLI collaboration IS453 "Emission Channeling lattice location experiments with Short-Lived Isotopes", with three of their young researchers winning awards at major conferences in Materials Science.

First, Lino Pereira, a post-doc at IKS/KU Leuven in Belgium was runner up in the "Young Researcher for Best Manuscript Competition" (sponsored by Elsevier BV) at the 21st International Conference on Ion Beam Analysis in Seattle, 23-28 June 2013, for his contribution on "Emission channeling studies on a challenging case of impurity lattice location: cation versus anion substitution in transition-metal doped GaN and ZnO".

Then, Lígia Amorim, a PhD student also at IKS, won the "Award for Best Student Oral Presentation" at the 17th International Conference on Radiation Effects in Insulators in Helsinki, 3 June to 5 July 2013, for her talk on "Lattice sites of implanted Mg in the group-III nitrides".

Last but not least, Daniel Silva, a PhD student from Porto University in Portugal, won the prestigious J.W. Corbett prize at the 27th International Conference on Defects in Semiconductors in Bologna, 21- 26 July 2013. The topic of his contribution was "Influence of the doping on the lattice sites of Fe in Si".

The ALICE Photon Spectrometer (PHOS) measures the photons that fly out of the extremely hot plasma created in lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ALICE teams are repairing and upgrading existing modules and getting ready to install the new module in time for the next run. The upgraded PHOS detector will be faster and more stable and better able to identify photons.

The ALICE PHOS detector operates at -25°C, which makes it the second-coldest element in the LHC after the cryogenic superconducting magnets. Since it was installed in 2009, the PHOS detector, with its cold and warm volumes, has been immersed in airtight boxes to avoid condensation in the cold volumes. Its 10,752 lead tungstate crystals were completely insulated from the outer ALICE environment and its modules were kept at a stable operating temperature of -25°C with very low humidity. This made access to the PHOS electronics impossible during the three years of ALICE operation. The health of the PHOS systems was monitored by the detector control system, but if anything happened to the front-end cards, they could not be replaced or repaired. It was like a satellite experiment: once launched, PHOS operated without any human access and was controlled remotely via telemetry.

Several problems accumulated over the three years of operation. Some front-end electronics cards stopped working and needed repair. At the beginning of ALICE operation in 2010, a readout time of 850 microseconds was adequate to cope with the low luminosity. But this readout time was rather long for the high-luminosity runs in 2011. So ALICE teams will change the readout system, to improve the readout time by almost a factor of 30.

Other subsystems of the PHOS detector such as the monitoring system, the trigger and the cooling system also required maintenance, repair or reprogramming. All these tasks require access to the inner components of the PHOS. The PHOS team is therefore taking advantage of the current long shutdown to repair broken front-end cards, reprogram their firmware and improve the remote control of the internal PHOS systems.

The current long accelerator shutdown is also being used to assemble and commission the new, fourth PHOS module and one module of the Charged Particle Veto detector (CPV). During the upcoming second run of the LHC, the one CPV and the four PHOS modules will have been installed together with the new electromagnetic calorimeter DCal, which will sit on the new support structure.

The installation of the upgraded PHOS is scheduled for the autumn of 2014. Several months will be needed to complete the integration of the PHOS and CPV detectors into the new ALICE environment, in time for the LHC restart in 2015. 

Read a longer version of this article:"PHOS commissioning to start during LS1"– ALICE Matters

Last week the NIWeek conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas, hosted the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards where computer-engineering company National Instruments recognized companies and universities that use graphical-system design to develop applications that meet complex challenges in science and engineering.

CERN scooped three prizes: the National Instruments Graphical System Design Achievement Award, the National Instruments Humanitarian Award and the Intel Intelligent Systems Award.

“Through the use of graphical system design, innovative problem-solving and hard work, the Graphical System Design Achievement Award finalists are developing applications that are meeting modern engineering challenges and changing the world,” says National Instruments cofounder Jeff Kodosky. “National Instruments is honored to recognize their significant contributions to science and engineering.”

CERN was selected for the particle accelerator and control systems for the MedAustron ion-therapy facility that was designed and constructed under the guidance of CERN in Austria. Ion therapy is an advanced form of radiotherapy, using beams of charged particles such as protons and carbon ions that are produced in particle accelerators to treat tumors. While in conventional radiotherapy X-rays traverse the body, depositing radiation as they pass through, charged particles deliver most of their energy at one point, sparing healthy tissue behind that point. The method is characterized by high precision, high efficacy and reduced side effects.

Control systems can contribute significantly to the performance of such particle accelerators. The system must accurately control the magnetic fields of several hundred magnets; must reconfigure the accelerator for large numbers of beam characteristics in a timely and reliable way and must be easy for medical teams to use.

“Thorough initial evaluation revealed that National Instruments hardware and software technologies meet the requirements to master these challenges”, says Johannes Gutleber, who leads the project’s accelerator control system.

National Instruments selected the 18 finalists for the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards from 152 submissions of authors from 29 countries. Winners were selected for each of the following nine categories: Advanced Control Systems, Advanced Research, Automated Test, Education, Energy, Life Sciences, RF and Communications, Structural and Physical Test and Monitoring, and Transportation.

A panel of technical experts and National Instruments executives determined the award winners based on criteria including technical difficulty and the benefits achieved from using the application. 

CERN will be hosting the first official stand-up comedy night LHComedy in the Globe of Science and Innovation on 30 August 2013 from 7.30pm-11pm.

"Comedy promises a fantastic and innovative new way for us to present the work going on at CERN, to engage with the public and to have fun," says organizer Sam Gregson.

Six CERN scientists: Sam Gregson, Alex Brown, Benjamin Frisch, Claire Lee, Hugo Day and Clara Nellist will explain their research and lift the lid on what it is like to work at CERN through the medium of stand-up comedy. They will be ably supported by host Helen Keen of BBC4’s “It is Rocket Science”, geek-pop cabaret sensation Jonny Berliner, Pierre Novellie (Chortle Student Comedian of the year 2012 finalist) and Lieven Scheire (“De Laaste Show” and "Scheire en de Schepping"). The show may also have an additional headline act. 

The aims of the evening are for CERN scientists to engage as a community with English speakers in Geneva outside of CERN, to entertain and continue to enthuse global audiences about the exciting work going on at CERN and to break-down the stereotypes associated with being a CERN scientist.

The event is FREE of charge, however entry will be by pre-booked ticket only. Tickets are available via the official event website.  The event will also be available to watch live online via CERN webcast and after the event on the CERN website. LHComedy will be in English and adult comedy is not excluded.

The event is fully supported by CERN and the British Council.

We hope you can make it.

Google Street View is an integrated service of Google Maps, introduced by Google in 2007. This service allows users to navigate virtually through streets and to enjoy a 360° panoramic view. Here are just a few examples.

CERN and Google have joined forces to create a panoramic virtual tour of the CERN site and those of its experiments on Google Street View and Google Maps. Google has already taken some shots on the Meyrin site and inside certain experimental facilities.

In June, a team from Google began the process of be taking street images across all of CERN’s sites using, among other things, a bike-mounted camera system known as the “Street View Trike”. The team will take images of CERN's Prevessin site tomorrow. These images will then be uploaded exclusively into Google Street View and Google Maps, with CERN’s consent. Please note that Google will not publish anything without prior approval from CERN.

To facilitate this filming work, you are kindly requested, should you come across the Google film crew, to go about your business normally (or keep your distance, should you prefer) and refrain from displaying or carrying banners or any kind of message, especially of a commercial or private nature.

Google has undertaken to blur out all faces and vehicle registration-plates appearing on the images filmed at CERN to ensure they cannot be recognized.

Many thanks in advance for your collaboration.

At the end of September CERN will open its doors to the world. Most of the site will be open access, with a large number of activities, workshops to explore and lectures to attend. For safety reasons, however, visits to underground areas will be limited in number. A reservation system to allocate tickets in batches has been set up, and demand has been so high that to have a place feels like finding a winning golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Although there is no lake of chocolate under the CERN laboratory, or an army of Oompa Loompas to care for the LHC, the underground experimental areas are truly amazing places. While the Open Days are for everyone, if you have other opportunities to visit the underground areas, please make use of them so that we can give as many members of the public their chance to to explore CERN's subterranean marvels.

Year-round, feel free to book a visit with the visits service. Though the LHC tunnel is not accessible, you can visit LHC experiments. Please note that visits to the underground areas are organized in groups of at least 8 people, and your are advised to book at least 3 months in advance. 

On Friday the President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano appointed four new senators for life: the music director and conductor “maestro” Claudio Abbado, the neuroscientist Professor Elena Cattaneo, the renowned architect Renzo Piano and Professor Carlo Rubbia, who was CERN Director-General from 1989 to 1993.

In 1984, Carlo Rubbia, then head of the UA1 collaboration, was awarded the Nobel prize in physics, together with Simon van der Meer, for the discovery of the W and Z particles – at that time two important missing components of the Standard Model. During his term of office as Director-General, the Large Electron Positron collider was inaugurated and the four LEP experiments produced their first results. He also mounted the case for the new Large Hadron Collider, which in 2012 led to the discovery of a Higgs boson. In 1993, the last year of his mandate, the World Wide Web protocol and code were declared “free of charge” for all time.

“We are very proud that such a major appointment has been granted to a former CERN Director-General and eminent scientist, Professor Carlo Rubbia. It is a recognition not only of his contribution to the development of particle physics but also of his role in our laboratory’s history and prestige,” says current Director-General Rolf Heuer.

In Italy, the senators for life have the same power as elected senators, which includes the right to vote; their mandate, as the term suggests, lasts for their whole lifetime. The four new senators for life are worldwide renowned personalities in the fields of music, art and science. “I am sure that the contribution of the new four senators to our democratic institutions, including the senate and the entire parliament, will be extremely valuable in fields that are vital to our country,” says President Giorgio Napolitano in a public announcement. “They will act completely independently of any political constraints.”

In March 2011 CERN released the first version of its Open Hardware Licence, a document to govern the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products. Now a new version of the licence is freeing designers to experiment further and exchange more knowledge related to hardware technologies.

The CERN Open Hardware Licence was created to bring the principles of the free and open source software movement to hardware: everyone should be free to see design documentation of hardware and to study, modify and share it.

“As founders of the Open Hardware Repository we were aware of the need for a legal tool that would allow knowledge sharing but also commercialization of products under the conditions guaranteed by open-source licences” says CERN Beams department engineer Javier Serrano, who co-authored the licence with Myriam Ayass, legal adviser for the Knowledge transfer group.

When some in the open-hardware-developer community criticized some aspects of CERN's license, Serrano and Ayass launched a collaborative online project that led to version 1.2.

Version 1.2 is lighter on the users of the licence. Now licensees who modified a design no longer have the obligation to notify the changes to upstream licensors. In addition to that, in order to guarantee that recipients of CERN OHL-licensed hardware get access to the design documents of a specific piece of hardware, version 1.2 includes the notion of Documentation Location. Another difference between the two versions is that Intergovernmental Organizations such as CERN are not singled out regarding their rights anymore. This means that they are as any other licensor or licensee.

Open Hardware will be showcased as an example of collaborative creation of knowledge in a workshop coordinated by Dannie Jost, Javier Serrano and Peter Troxler at the next OKCon-Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from 16-18 September 2013.

CERN’s theoretical physicist John Ellis will give a plenary talk on “Open Science and Research”.

Some say that science can't be funny. Tell that to the packed auditorium and almost 10,000 webcast viewers who tuned in on Friday 30 August to watch LHComedy: "CERN After Dark"– a night of science stand-up comedy in the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation. 

Hosted by Helen Keen from BBC4's It is Rocket Science, the event opened to the public and online viewers from around the world.  Six CERN affiliates (Sam Gregson, Alex Brown, Benjamin Frisch, Claire Lee, Hugo Day, Clara Nellist) hit the stage with geek-pop sensation Jonny Berliner, and comedians Pierre Novellie and Lieven Scheire. The collision of particle physics with stand-up comedy brought a new twist to current research and public engagement at the organization.  

"CERN provides opportunities for researchers to reach out to the public in sometimes new, experimental and ambitious ways," says Alex Brown of the Knowledge Transfer Group.  "The idea is that you get researchers to do stand-up comedy and reach an audience that would otherwise not normally go to an academic talk.  So you get a comedy audience to learn a bit of science."

The event caught the attention of UK's The Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel.  It received remarks on Twitter as being "Geeky, exhilarating, uplifting and, above all, incredibly smart." As physics moves further into popular culture, with shows like The Big Bang Theory and BBC's The Infinite Monkey Cage, it seemed an appropriate evening to celebrate science and comedy together. 

Missed the event? Watch it here 

CERN is inviting final-year undergraduates and masters and PhD students taking lessons in physics, computer science and engineering to take part in the 5th International School of Trigger and Data Acquisition (ISOTDAQ2014).

The course comprises a series of lectures and practical sessions at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, in Budapest, Hungary, from 28 January to 5 February 2014. The school will cover topics from trigger electronics to data acquisition software, network architecture and more.

The main aim is to provide an overview of the basic instruments and methods used in high-energy physics, spanning from small experiences in lab to the very large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The concepts taught also apply to fields outside high-energy physics, such as data acquisition in astrophysics.

The Wigner Centre recently became a major extension of CERN's computing facilities, hosting an extension of Tier 0 activities of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.

Please note that though the lectures and labs are completely financed by supporting institutions, a €450 fee is required from the students to cover accommodation, lunches, coffee and social dinner.

Find out more about the school or register here. The deadline for applications is 1 November 2013. 

Between 27 and 29 September, CERN is holding two major events for the general public: the Open Days on 28 and 29 September, preceded by the Origins2013 evening on 27 September. A large number of visitors is expected for these two events and special measures will be implemented. Certain roads around CERN’s two main sites will be closed to traffic and a system of free car parks and shuttles will be available.

Read the practical information

[scroll for English]

In July, CERN and EUROVISION announced grants for multiplatform media proposals to spark the scientific curiosity of "tweens"– children aged eight to twelve. Now trailers for two projects chosen for further development are ready to watch. They aired for the first time at the EUROVISION TV meetings in Berlin, Germany, this week.

Baby Cow Animation and Bigfatstudio presented Cubic, Quark and Big G – the story of three quirky robots who explore the 'fun' in fundamental physics through their bumbling, slapstick experiments. Some 26 five-minute episodes are planned, covering as many topics – ranging from the size of atoms and the curves in space-time to the big bang. In the series – aimed at 8-10 year olds – the clumsy robots engage in one experiment (or simulation) per topic, per episode, in a crash-bang-wallop style, befitting their bumbling curiosity.

(Video: Baby Cow Animation & Bigfatstudio)

Rolf Landua of CERN's Education and Outreach department was scientific consultant for the series. "I had to check that the storylines and metaphors in the cartoon are as scientifically correct as possible," he says. "It's not easy finding a compromise between the world of imagination of an 8-12 year old and abstract physics concepts." But Landua says it's worth a try. "If you manage to explain such concepts to 8-12 year-olds it might lay a seed of interest in physics. Our goal is to lay that seed, raise that trigger in their minds; get people interested."

Quarks! from production company Screen Glue, is a series of short films targeting children from ten years old, featuring three teenage pranksters who share a superpower – the ability to alter fundamental laws of physics.

(Video: Screen Glue)

CERN's head of communications James Gillies was scientific consultant for Quarks!."All kids are scientists," he says. "And the years before the teens are a vitally important time to keep them engaged in science, before high school starts channeling them away to other subjects."

If my interviewees are anything to go by, science fiction can work wonders for CERN recruiting: Gillies cites Dr Who and Star Trek as early influences that sparked his interest in physics; for Landua, it was the rather more high-brow Space Odyssey: 2001.

The trailers will also be shown in October at the entertainment industry's Mipcom and Power to the Pixel events, where the films' producers will be seeking funds for production.

Transparency, accuracy and proximity to its members: in recent years the CERN Pension Fund has put a huge effort into creating clear procedures, defining and sharing its strategies, and making its information public. The latest addition is the publication of the Annual Investment Report on the Pension Fund website.

Are you curious about the investments made by the CERN and ESO Pension Fund? Do you want to locate the buildings belonging to the Fund? Or see how the Fund controls its risk level? Help is at hand: the Pension Fund has just released the Annual Investment Report (AIR) on its website. “The online AIR will be updated quarterly to include the latest investment performance of the Fund, shortly after the end of every quarter,” says Théodore Economou, the Pension Fund’s Chief Executive Officer. “This is a significant improvement in the frequency of distribution of information regarding investments. Until now, stakeholders had to wait for the publication of the financial statements, which occurs only once a year.”

“This improvement was made possible by the 2012 implementation of a single master custodian structure, where all assets are now held by a single independent custodian. Therefore we are now able to get daily, monthly and quarterly investment performance figures,” he explains.

The online AIR presents in a concise format the Fund’s performance versus its objectives, risk compliance and asset allocation, as well as its real-estate portfolio. The report also includes the investment mandate, the compliance framework and the risk management process. “The publication of the AIR reflects industry best practice in our category of defined-benefit pension plans and is in line with the Fund’s strategy to properly inform its stakeholders,” says Théodore Economou.

If you are a fan of figures and percentages or are simply curious about the location and surface areas of the apartments or the number of hectares of woodland the Fund owns, visit the Pension Fund website to access the 2013 AIR (2nd quarter).

There aren't many people who can throw a baton in the air, do a backhand spring and catch it with the grace of a dancer. Well, Julie Haffner from the CERN Press Office can. Baton twirling started as her hobby but soon became a passion – leading her team to win the International Baton Twirling Cup.

There is no telling when or where people will find their passion. For Julie Haffner, it was when she followed her cousin to a baton twirling class at the age of 10. Since that fortuitous day, she has committed herself to the sport and competed on international stages.

Very close to rhythmic gymnastics, baton twirling requires skilful coordination and teamwork. Julie's performances combine the precision of baton manipulation, the grace of a dancer and the strength of a gymnast. The first year in which she competed with the Gex Twirling Club, her team managed to reach the final of the French Championship. This taste of success motivated Julie to continue with the sport: "You have to learn to fight and gain a competitive spirit."

In 2005, her team came first at the French Championship and third at the European Baton Twirling Cup. She attributes the success to her cohesive team: "You are always with the same girls, so it’s like a family." They do the same choreography for a year, so they have to be persistent and work together.

This past summer, Julie and her team came sixth at the French Championship. This could have hurt their chances for the International Cup selections, but, in the end, they were selected by the French judges on the basis of video footage. Teams were judged on their synchronisation, showmanship and technical execution, and despite having come sixth, Julie’s team was chosen along with two others to represent France at the International Cup. That was a good decision, because not only did they beat the two other French teams, they also won first place.

This was a highlight of her baton-twirling career. She had the rare opportunity to represent her country knowing that she had worked hard to achieve that honour: "It’s more important to be happy with what you have done than where you come in the competition."

Collide @ CERN and Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin are working in collaboration with the CMS experiment at CERN, which is hosting the world première of their new performance piece, QUANTUM, in September. This is Jobin's latest choreographic creation that came directly out of his Collide @ CERN residency last year and will be danced directly above one of the spots on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where the Higgs boson was first detected by both ATLAS and CMS.

"During my residency at CERN I was trying to find movement generators based on quantum physics," says Jobin. "It was a challenge – the movement of particles can be so abstract; it's about possibilities. Eventually I found rules for the movement of human bodies inspired by quantum physics."

This contemporary dance piece is the result of a creative collision between the two first laureates of the Collide @ CERN artistic residencies: Jobin and German visual artist Julius von Bismarck, who created the lighting installation used in the dance piece during his Collide @ CERN residency. The installation, featuring hanging lamps cycling in and out of various resonant modes of a set of pendulums, was first shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2011.

The music score, using real data from the LHC, was created by American composer Carla Scaletti, and the costume design was by Belgian fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard.

This first Collide @ CERN collaboration, QUANTUM, has been awarded the prestigious Hermès Foundation New Settings Award. This means that the piece, after its premiere at CERN, will go on tour to Paris at Thèatre de la Cité Internationale on 4, 5, 7 and 8 November followed by performances in New York in 2014.

To see QUANTUM for free during the CERN Open Days on 28-29 September at 11am and 3pm, go to CMS on the CERN Cessy Site in France and queue for entry at least an hour before. We look forward to seeing you there.

A group of students visiting Point 5 on Tuesday morning were roped in to help CMS conduct tests on infrastructure designed to monitor the flow of underground visits during the Open Days. It uses long-range ultra-high-frequency radio-frequency identification (UHF RFID) chips and this successful test means that the 20 RFID gates installed all over CERN can now be considered operational.

When CMS proposed the system a year ago, it was with a different aim in mind. Zoltan Szillasi, a CMS collaborator who helps organize CMS visits and manage site safety, says, “If our personnel want to enter the underground caverns for work, we have to badge in. Our presence in the caverns is recorded and controlled. For large groups of visitors, though, we only make an entry in a notebook near the lifts, and it is the responsibility of the guides to sign them in and out.”

Knowing exactly how many people are underground is very important, particularly in case of an emergency as it helps the fire brigade conduct successful evacuations. In emergencies, a small human error – counting an incorrect number when making the entry or forgetting to sign out – could prove fatal. “We wanted to implement a system that is as automatic as it can be,” says Szillasi.

“Such a system would be useful for other sites as well, so we suggested implementing it for all underground visit during the Open Days,” says Szillasi.

Commercially available RFID-based tracking systems were too complex and expensive for CERN’s basic needs. So Szillasi and Francois Briard from GS developed a cheaper and simpler solution in-house that will also be used for ticketing on the Open Days.

To test the tracking setup, two RFID gates were installed at Point 5; one on the surface near the lift entry, and one on the lowermost level, near the “materials access device” or MAD. On Tuesday, 29 visitors and CMS members wore special identification badges with RFID chips on them and passed through both gates before returning to the surface.

In the aboveground CMS Control Room, Szillasi checked the number of people passing through the gates. “I counted 29 in, 29 out!” he said when the CMS team returned.

On the Open Days, our underground guests will be given special badges equipped with RFID chips which will also serve as unique souvenirs as all visitors are welcome to take these badges home with them. 

The 2013 edition of the CERN Road Race took place on 18 September. Despite the poor weather, some 60 people (including 5 children) ran the 5.5. kilometre race on the west side of the Meyrin side (children ran 1.8 kilometres.)

Runners were put in different categories (girls, boys, women, men, and by age group). All took home a souvenir prize, while the quickest left with trophies. 

"There was a great atmosphere despite the rain," says Klaus Hanke, secretary of the CERN Running Club, who organizes the event. "I'd like to thank the volunteers and CERN services that made this event a success."

To check the race results, check out the CERN Running Club website. 

On Friday 27 September, CERN welcomed 12 citizen journalists to the 2013 CERN Tweetup, an event where a select few people from around the world had the opportunity to take a private tour of CERN and share their experiences with their followers on Twitter.

The participants were hand picked from almost 100 applicants and hailed from seven countries and a wide range of careers – from scientists and engineers to designers and filmmakers. The successful applicants were all active Twitter users with followings on social media beyond their friends and family, and who had expressed a sincere interest in CERN science.

“Through the social media posts sent out by these visitors with the hashtag #CERNtweetup, we saw that a total of 2000 people actively participated online, reaching a potential worldwide audience of 2.3 million,” says Kate Kahle, CERN's social media manager.

In addition to 12 people on the tweetup tour, CERN was unexpectedly graced with the presence of Camilla Corona– a NASA mascot and the first rubber chicken in space. Throughout the day Camilla tweeted to her almost 10,000 Twitter followers with the help of fellow tweeter, Alex Neumann from Germany.

The day was filled with surprises for the participants, including exclusive previews of the Open-Day visit points and chance meetings with theorists including John Ellis. The tweeters also received a firsthand account of the birth of the World Wide Web and the early days of the internet from Ben Segal and François Flückiger and exclusive seats at the Origins 2013 European Researchers’ Night event. Even after the tweetup officially ended, many of the participants stayed through the CERN Open Days and continued to share pictures and answer questions for their followers.

"The visitors were incredibly active throughout the day and really provided a vehicle for their followers to participate in the event through them," says Kahle. "We were delighted by their enthusiasm."

(Video: CERN, with images from Nobelprize.org)

Cameras were rolling in CERN's building 40 on Tuesday when members of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations heard the news from the Swedish Academy of Sciences that François Englert and Peter W. Higgs had received the 2013 Nobel prize in physics. Watch their reaction in the video above.

The Nobel prize was awarded to Englert and Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider." The ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced their discovery of the particle at CERN on 4 July 2012.

As the news came through from Stockholm, CERN physicists burst into applause, and CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer gave a spontaneous speech congratulating the theoretical physicists for the award and the experimental physicists at CERN for their discovery. 

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations each involves more than 3000 people from all around the world. They have constructed sophisticated instruments – particle detectors – to study proton collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), itself a highly complex instrument involving many people and institutes in its construction.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism was first proposed in 1964 in two papers published independently, the first by Belgian physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, and the second by British physicist Peter Higgs. It explains how the force responsible for beta decay is much weaker than electromagnetism, but is better known as the mechanism that endows fundamental particles with mass. A third paper, published by Americans Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen with their British colleague Tom Kibble further contributed to the development of the new idea, which now forms an essential part of the Standard Model of particle physics. As was pointed out by Higgs, a key prediction of the idea is the existence of a massive boson of a new type, which was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN in 2012. The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and all the visible matter in the universe, are made, along with the interactions that govern their behaviour. It is a remarkably successful theory that has been thoroughly tested by experiment over many years. Until last year, the BEH mechanism was the last remaining piece of the model to be experimentally verified. Now that it has been found, experiments at CERN are eagerly looking for physics beyond the Standard Model.

(Video: Noemí Carabán/CERN)

Beams do not circulate inside accelerators forever. As particles collide with the sides of the beam pipe or with each other, the beams "degrade"– they become less likely to give collisions that could lead to interesting physics.

Accelerator physicists can then choose to "dump" the beams, removing them from the accelerator and sending them to be safely absorbed at a "beam dump"– usually by a radiation-shielded block deep underground.

In the video above, CERN engineers install a new beam dump on the Proton Synchrotron Booster – a key element in the CERN accelerator complex that has been delivering protons to the Proton Synchrotron (PS) since 1972.

The Booster is made up of four superimposed synchrotron rings that receive beams of protons from linear accelerator 2 (Linac 2) at 50 MeV and accelerate them to 1.4 GeV for injection into the PS. Before the Booster received its first beams on 26 May 1972, protons were injected directly from Linac 2 into the PS, where they were accelerated to 26 GeV. The low injection energy of 50 MeV limited the number of protons the PS could accept. The Booster allows the PS to accept over 100 times more protons, which greatly enhances the beam's use for experiments.

The original beam dump on the PS Booster was designed in the 1960s to cope with beam energies in the order of 800 MeV from Linac 2. But after the second long shutdown of CERN accelerator complex in 2017-2018, the higher energy Linac 4 is scheduled to replace Linac 2 as the source of protons for the Large Hadron Collider. So the new PS Booster dump is expected to withstand beams of up to 2 GeV.

"The new beam dump is cylindrical like the old one, but it is larger in length and diameter, so it will stop more particles," says CERN engineer Alba Sarrió, who led the project to replace the dump. "The new dump is an alloy of 99% copper, with traces of chromium and zirconium. This gives it favourable thermo-mechanical properties compared to the old, iron beam dump." Sarrió says the new beam dump should last for 25-30 years.

This video shows the installation of that new dump core inside a cavity one metre in diameter, surrounded by five shielding rings made of concrete and steel. The replacement is the culmination of months of preparation, an interdisciplinary work involving several teams from the Engineering, Beams and Technology departments, as well as the collaboration and supervision of radioprotection experts.