At the recent CERN Open Days, theorists, physicists, experimentalists and even an anthropologist presented their work to the public in a series of talks.

The talks are now available to watch online. You can see the full list on CERN's YouTube channel. Please note the link below each video to the CERN Document Server, where you can watch a version of each talk showing the speakers' slides.

The lectures cover more than 20 topics from the invention of the World Wide Web and the discovery of the Higgs boson to CERN's antimatter experiments and the Large Hadron Collider.

So why not watch CERN theorist Michelangelo Mangano exploring open questions in physics? Or see Fabiola Gianotti explain how the Higgs boson can affect your life? Web pioneer Robert Cailliau, who developed the World Wide Web with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, speaks about the past and future of the web, and anthropologist Arpita Roy explores the motivations of the CERN community.

Watch talks from the CERN Open Days

Licences specify the terms and conditions under which things can be used. All too frequently in everyday life we come across restrictive licences that actually seem to discourage usage, disallowing copying or sharing. But a whole other family of free licences aim to encourage use and sharing, asking simply for proper recognition and reciprocal behaviour in return.

Since its inception, CERN has used the web to share multimedia material openly. To signal clearly that we wanted people to use our photos and videos we crafted a pioneering free media licence. It included clauses that satisfied the demands of being an intergovernmental organization, and ensured consistency with our founding convention as a peaceful scientific collaboration.

As the web grew, multimedia material proliferated around the globe, and so did licences. The average web-citizen, allergic to the legalese that these licences were drafted in, was often confused or ignorant of the details of any particular conditions of use. Standardized free licences such as Creative Commons grew in popularity due to the snowball effect of being consistently used and commonly understood. As standardized licences spread, CERN’s licence has unwittingly become isolated and viewed as special, and the popular outlets of today often do not include our multimedia since the licence is not understood as compatible.

So, encouraged and supported by our experiment outreach teams, we have made our first collection available under a Creative Commons licence. We chose the CC-BY-SA licence, to ensure credit is given to CERN for the photos (“BY”) and that modified versions also get shared freely (“Share Alike”). Through this small but significant change, we hope our photos and videos will now be made available in more places, used by a wider community and re-used more confidently by more people.

Already the change has allowed photos of our recent Director-Generals to be used consistently in Wikipedia pages for the first time, and for the Higgs discovery plots from ATLAS and CMS to actually be included on the Higgs boson page! We intend to expand this first small collection with more and more content from our vast archive.

The winds of change have started to blow, and we hope to soon make standardized licences the norm at CERN.

Today marks the start of a workshop at CERN on energy for sustainable science at research infrastructures. Visit the industrial exhibition in the Pas perdus, first floor of CERN’s main building, and watch today’s talks via webcast from 2pm.

This three-day workshop focuses on energy management strategies at research infrastructures worldwide, including KEK in Japan, Fermilab and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, DESY, PSI and GSI in Germany and ESS in Sweden. It follows on from the first edition of the workshop held at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden in 2011.

Energy experts from public and private sectors are showcasing ways to recuperate waste heat, efficiently cool data centres and use green technologies and civil engineering solutions for sustainable campuses. CERN energy coordinator, Helfried Burckhart, is presenting the Laboratory’s energy management plan.

Today’s webcast talks begin with welcome speeches from the organisers (CERN, ERF and ESS) followed by plenary talks ranging from the energy policies of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, and the European Commission, to energy management in Japan, to European innovation, smart systems and efficient data centres.

Watch the webcast at 2pm CET

CERN physicist and former spokesperson for the ATLAS Experiment, Fabiola Gianotti, is among the 26 scientists who have been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.

"I am honoured to be on such a prestigious panel and glad that a particle physicist has been included in the board, as this recognises the importance of fundamental research. I hope we can contribute to finding ways for society to deploy innovation and progress in science and technology to the advantage of a better world," said Gianotti.

The Scientific Advisory Board was set up on the recommendation of a report – Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing– published in January 2012 to "strengthen the interface between policy and science".

The board represents experts from technology and engineering to medicine and agricultural science. They will provide advice on science, technology and innovation for sustainable development to UN’s executive heads and Secretary-General. UNESCO will host the board’s secretariat.

Besides Gianotti, four other physicists have been appointed to the board: Susan Avery, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Vladimir Fortov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and nuclear physicist Dong-Pil Min from Seoul National University.

"It brings together scientists of international stature and will serve as a global reference point to improve links between science and public policies," said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.

The first meeting of the newly established board will take place at the start of 2014. The board members are appointed for two years with the possibility of renewal. The position is unpaid and the members are expected to "act in their personal capacity and will provide advice on a strictly independent basis".

Last December, the United Nations General Assembly granted CERN observer status, which allows CERN the right to participate in the work of the General Assembly and to attend its sessions as an observer.

As you are aware, CERN will be celebrating its 60th birthday in 2014. To mark the event, next year will be filled with exciting events... of which there will be a taster in the next issue of the Bulletin.

In the meantime, we are pleased to present the official logo for this important anniversary: created by the Graphic Design Service, it elegantly combines the curves of the numbers 6 and 0 to mirror the shape of our accelerator chain, and in doing so pays homage to the technological prowess of CERN’s installations.

The overlap of the 6 and the 0 also symbolises collaboration between countries, professions and people, which is one of the organization’s fundamental values. The slightly tilted perspective of the logo suggests the geographical layout of CERN’s facilities as well as the dynamism of a forward-looking laboratory.

There’s an obvious nod to the CERN logo, but the new logo differs in the way it evokes a more festive spirit: formed of a loop like a ceremonial ribbon, it gives a foretaste of what is shaping up to be a memorable year for the laboratory.

Hans Blix speaks to CERN about thorium energy, nuclear safety and non-proliferation (Video: CERN)

The Thorium Energy Conference, ThEC13, ran from 27 to 31 October at CERN, addressing the scientific and technical advances offered by thorium– a silvery white metal four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust – in alternative nuclear technologies for energy production and for the destruction of nuclear waste.

Conference Chair Egil Lillestol invited Swedish diplomat and politician Hans Blix to talk about "Thorium Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation". In a career spanning more than 50 years, Blix has been head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Blix highlighted the advantages of thorium in terms of safety, disposal of radioactive waste, and nuclear non-proliferation. "Some people are worried about the spread of nuclear weapons through the use of nuclear techniques," he says. "With thorium you cannot get a material from which you can make bombs. It's very satisfactory from this point of view."

During the 1990s, CERN pioneered research into thorium technologies with experiments instigated by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, testing the basic concepts of a thorium-fuelled reactor driven by a proton accelerator.

Find out more about the conference

CERN theorist Slava Rychkov got an unexpected phone call on the way home from the climbing gym last week. A member of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's Fundamental Physics Prize committee called to inform Rychkov that he had won the $100,000 New Horizons prize for promising junior researchers in fundamental physics.

"It was totally unexpected," says Rychkov. "I'm always happy for colleagues when they get prizes, but of course that is not the reason we do research!"

Rychkov was born in Samara, Russia, some 1000km from Moscow. He studied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and later at Princeton, and first became interested in connecting mathematical questions to the real world during a postdoc in Amsterdam.

"But my second postdoc – at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, Italy, under Riccardo Barbieri – was a really formative experience," he says. "That's where I leant which were the experimentally relevant questions."

For Rychkov, the experimentally relevant questions were part of a theory called electroweak symmetry breaking. At Pisa, he worked on scenarios such as Supersymmetry and Composite Higgs, which describe possible physics beyond the Standard Model. But it was for his work on conformal field theory – which Rychkov started during a month-long visit to the CERN Theory Unit in August 2006  – that he won the New Horizons prize.

Slava Rychkov in his CERN office (Image: Luisa Doplicher)

"A few years earlier, the ideas of conformal field theory led to the formulation of Conformal Technicolor – a highly efficient model of electroweak symmetry breaking," says Rychkov. "With Supersymmetry you have to add lots of particles to the Standard Model to make the equations work. But conformal field theory works well with minimal modification to the Standard Model – just the part that describes the Higgs at high energies. You can solve the hierarchy problem, but at the same time you don't destroy how the Model describes everything else. In this scenario you could have it both ways!"

Though it later turned out that Conformal Technicolor is impossible, the analytical and numerical techniques that Rychkov and others developed to rule out this scenario are arguably the most important part of his research. "It became clear that the method we developed could be applied to other physical situations which don't have to do with electroweak symmetry breaking," he says.

This method, "conformal bootstrap" was first proposed in the 1970s but lay mostly dormant apart from some exceptional cases. Rychkov and others have reinvigorated this area of physics with a new approach. "We have shown that there are equations there that we have to take seriously. We don't have to keep conformal bootstrap on life-support any more," he says. "The field has now acquired a life of its own, and I'm thinking about the next direction to go." 

Also honoured with New Horizons prizes this year are physicists Freddy Cachazo of the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada, and Shiraz Naval Minwalla of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.

The Short Model Coil (SMC) programme tests new magnet technologies with magnets about 30 centimetres long. The technology developed in the SMC will eventually help engineers build more powerful magnets for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and future accelerators.

Currently, the LHC uses niobium-titanium superconducting magnets to both bend and focus proton beams as they race around the LHC. But these magnets are not powerful enough to support stronger focusing and higher energies. So engineers are looking into a new superconducting material, niobium tin.

"With the existing niobium-titanium technology, 8 tesla is about the maximum practical operation field," says engineer Juan Carlos Perez, who is leading the SMC project. "The magnetic field you can produce thanks to the new material is at least 50% higher."

Niobium tin is a superconducting material that can generate a magnetic field in the range from 15-20 tesla. Although it was discovered before niobium titanium, it is not commonly used in accelerators because it is challenging to work with.

"Niobium tin must be heat treated at high temperatures – about 650 ⁰C – to form the superconducting phase, and becomes extremely brittle after the heat treatment," says Perez. "The SMC project is developing technologies to master this material, working closely with US colleagues who are heavily invested in this technology."

Engineers working on the magnets for the high-luminosity upgrade of the LHC want to eventually reach magnetic fields exceeding 12 tesla, says Perez. These higher magnetic fields will allow significantly stronger bending and focusing strengths in the LHC dipoles and quadropoles.

"Within the next 10 years we want to build a set of new 'final-focus' quadrupoles close to the LHC experiments, with higher strength, resulting in smaller beams at the LHC collision points" says Perez. "This will increase the number of collisions per second and generate more data for the experiments. In the longer term – over the next 20 years or so – niobium tin will be a key technology. It could allow engineers to increase the energy in a future circular collider by a factor five to ten times the present record at the LHC."

The present world record for niobium-tin magnets in dipole configuration is 16.1 tesla, held by an American research group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The most recent CERN-built SMC, using a cable with a geometry very close to that of the 11 tesla dipoles presently under development, reached 13.5 tesla. "We still have a long way to go," says Perez. "But the SMC project is a first and encouraging step in the right direction."

On 14 November, the first H- (one proton surrounded by two electrons) beam was accelerated to the energy of 3 MeV in the Linac 4– the new linear accelerator that will replace Linac 2 as low-energy injector in the LHC accelerator chain.

Using the recently installed Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) accelerator, 13 mA of current were accelerated to the energy of 3 MeV.

Current measured by the instruments at the end of the acceleration line on 14 November (Image: Linac 4 collaboration)

After the successful commissioning of the Linac 4 RFQ at the 3 MeV test stand completed during the first months of 2013, the whole equipment (composed by the RFQ itself, the following Medium Energy Beam Transport line and its diagnostic line) were moved to the Linac 4 tunnel during summer and installed in their final position. In the meantime, a new ion source was assembled, installed and successfully commissioned in the Linac 4 tunnel. It was ready on time, at the end of October, to deliver the required beam at the RFQ entrance.

After a short radio-frequency commissioning required to operate it, the beam was accelerated and transported to the beam dump at the end of the diagnostic line. After this succesful initial step, three more RF structures will be progressively installed to take the H- beam to the final energy of 160 MeV.

A helpful smiley face on an emergency exit. A female physicist on the phone by a poster of Sean Connery. John Ellis behind a mountain of scientific papers.

In Inside CERN, photographer Andri Pol captures the essence of day-to-day life at CERN in a series of beautifully simple snapshots. There's a real sense of community in these images – chats over laptops, physicists napping at their desks, discussions by an equation-filled blackboard. The high-tech vistas, mundane corridors and faces from around the globe come together to give a very vivid impression of life at our unique laboratory. 

(Image: Andri Pol)

CERN's gigantic detectors have been photographed before, as have many of the people who work here. But Pol breathes life into his photo essay with an original eye, a light, airy style and arresting compositions. He presents CERN as a very human story – a candid portrait of people at work.

"The best moments were always when I met people, when they showed me and explained to me what they were doing," says Pol, who completed the work in a series of visits to the laboratory over two years. "I was fascinated by this immense passion that everybody seems to have. Everybody is proud to be a part of CERN and is happy to exchange ideas with colleagues." Pol extends his thanks to Director-General Rolf Heuer for giving the go-ahead for the project, and to all the scientists and technicians who opened their doors to him.

Several images stood out for me: There's CMS physicist Richard Kellogg seemingly baffled by an array of unwashed coffee cups – a picture that could very well be an icon of day-to-day life here. Then there's the "ATLAS Tokyo team" subsisting on cans of energy drinks, or a Dutch physicist working assiduously in an office inexplicably filled with brightly coloured balloons.

The beauty of Inside CERN is the quirky detail; the countless ways that people interact with and adapt to the laboratory environment.

Inside CERN is a pleasure to peruse. Take a look.

(Image: Andri Pol)

Inside CERN, a photo essay by Andri Pol, will soon be available at the CERN library. 

The ATLAS experiment at CERN has released preliminary results that show evidence that the Higgs boson decays to two tau particles. Taus belong to a group of subatomic particles called the fermions, which make up matter. This result – measured at 4.1 sigma on the 5-point scale particle physicists use to determine the certainty of a result – is the first evidence for a Higgs decay to fermions.

On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a new particle, which was later confirmed to be a Higgs boson.

For physicists, the discovery meant the beginning of a quest to find out what the new particle was, if it fit in the Standard Model, our current model of nature in particle physics, or if its properties could point to new physics beyond that model. An important property of the Higgs boson that ATLAS physicists are trying to measure is how it decays.

Graphical representation of a Higgs boson decaying to two tau particles in the ATLAS detector. The taus decay into an electron (blue line) and a muon (red line) (Image: ATLAS)

The Higgs boson lives only for a short time and disintegrates into other particles. The various possibilities of the final states are called decay modes. So far, ATLAS physicists had found evidence that the Higgs boson decays into different types of gauge bosons - the kind of elementary particles that carry forces. The other family of fundamental particles, the fermions, make up matter. The tau is a fermion and behaves like a very massive electron.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism was first proposed to describe how gauge bosons acquire mass. But the Standard Model predicts that fermions also acquire mass in this manner, so the Higgs boson could decay directly to either bosons or fermions. The new preliminary result from ATLAS shows clear evidence that the Higgs boson indeed does decay to fermions, consistent with the rate predicted by the Standard Model.

This important finding was made possible through careful analysis of data produced by the LHC during its first run. Only with new data will physicists be able to determine if the compatibility remains or if other new models become viable. Fortunately, the next LHC run, which begins in 2015, is expected to produce several times the existing data sample. In addition, the proton collisions will be at higher energies, producing Higgs bosons at higher rates.

ATLAS' broad physics programme, which includes precision measurements of the Higgs boson, will continue to test the Standard Model. The years ahead will be exciting for particle physics as – the LHC experiments have found new territory that they have only just begun to explore.

Read more: For a detailed account see "Higgs into Fermions" by the ATLAS collaboration

In 1954 CERN was born. The laboratory was the first pan-European scientific endeavour. Just a few years after the Second World War, 12 European countries joined forces and built what has become the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. In 2014, CERN will celebrate 60 years of cutting-edge science for peace.

It all started in 1949, when French Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Louis de Broglie called for the creation of a European laboratory. The idea was quickly adopted and, in 1953, 12 countries signed the Convention for the establishment of a European Organization for Nuclear Research under the auspices of UNESCO. “Next year we will celebrate the event with UNESCO in Paris at the beginning of July,” says Sascha Schmeling, general coordinator of the 60th anniversary celebrations. “We have invited one of the founding fathers of CERN, the French diplomat François de Rose, to take part, and he has accepted the invitation with enthusiasm.”

The events in Paris will be followed by celebrations on 29 September for CERN’s actual birthday. “We are planning events for the personnel, the scientific community and the local and international public,” says Schmeling. “All the CERN Member States are invited to hold their own celebrations and some of them have already shared with us their ideas.”

The CERN team in charge of the celebrations will coordinate all the events and offer help and support to all the participating stakeholders. “Regardless of where the events take place, our common goal is to highlight the role of science as a motor for peace and progress and to stress the importance of sharing science as widely as possible through education and training,” says Schmeling.

The countdown to CERN’s 60th anniversary has started. The official logo has already been launched and the effervescence is spreading. If you have already planned an event and think it should be included in the official programme of anniversary-related celebrations, please email CERN60-DropBox@cern.ch.

Calendar of events

Please note that the list of events might change. Some of the events listed above will be by invitation only.

On Tuesday 10 December at 7.30pm, there will be a special screening of the documentary Particle Fever in the Main Auditorium (Building 500) at CERN for CERN badge holders. Come along after work to check it out.

"Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity. For the first time, a film gives audiences a front row seat to our generation’s most significant and inspiring scientific breakthrough as it happens. Particle Fever follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet, pushing the edge of human innovation.

As they seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe, 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries joined forces in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the big bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter. But our heroes confront an even bigger challenge: have we reached our limit in understanding why we exist?

Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, and edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine."

- From Particle Fever press pack

Particle Fever is screening at 7.30pm on Tuesday 10 December in the CERN Auditorium. Runtime: 99 minutes. Please note this screening is for CERN badge holders. 

Today at in CERN's Main Auditorium Nobel prize laureate Kostya Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the UK will present a talk entitled "Materials in the Flatland". Novoselov shared the Nobel prize in physics in 2010 with Andre Geim, then also at the University of Manchester, "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

Watch the webcast here at 4.30pm CET

When one writes with a pencil, thin flakes of graphite are left on a surface. Some of them are only one atom thick and can be viewed as individual atomic planes cleaved away from the bulk. Atom-thick crystals of graphite (dubbed graphene) turned out to be the strongest crystals available to us, the most conductive, most thermally conductive, most elastic, flexible, transparent material available. Its electronic properties are particularly exciting: its quasiparticles are governed by the Dirac equation so that charge carriers in graphene mimic relativistic particles with zero rest mass.

Still, probably the most important property of graphene is that it has opened a floodgate of experiments on many other 2D atomic crystals: Boron nitride (BN), Niobium selenide (NbSe2), Tantalum sulphide (TaS2), Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and more. The resulting pool of 2D crystals is huge, and they cover a massive range of properties: from the most insulating to the most conductive, from the strongest to the softest.

If 2D materials provide a large range of different properties, sandwich structures made up of two, three, four or more different layers of such materials can offer even greater scope. Since these 2D-based heterostructures can be tailored with atomic precision and individual layers of very different character can be combined together. The properties of these structures can be tuned to study novel physical phenomena or to fit an enormous range of possible applications, with the functionality of heterostructure stacks is “embedded” in their design.

CERN celebrates Steve Myers’ career with a colloquium tomorrow at 2.30pm in the Main Auditorium.

Watch the webcast here at 2.30pm CET on Friday 13 December

Steve was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and educated at Queen’s University, where he received a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical and Electronic engineering. He then completed his Ph.D. at Queen’s.

He started at CERN as Engineer-in-Charge for the operation of the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) before moving on to the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). He took responsibility for the commissioning of LEP, was in charge of the preparation for physics in the 1990s, and was nominated project leader of the upgrade from 1996 until 2000.

In October 2008, he was nominated Director of Accelerators and Technology, "responsible for the operation and exploitation of the whole CERN accelerator complex, with particular emphasis on the LHC and for the development of new projects and technologies." He directed the repair of the LHC after the accident in September 2008 and steered the operation of the collider in 2010, 2011, and 2012. On 4 July 2012 the collider had produced enough events to allow two large LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS, to discover the Higgs boson.

Steve has been appointed the Head of the newly established Office of Medical Applications at CERN, as of January 2014.

He has been honoured with several awards, including honorary doctorates from the University of Geneva and the Queen’s University of Belfast. He was the recipient of the IOP Duddell Medal in 2003, and was awarded the 2010 International Particle Accelerator Achievement prize for a lifetime of outstanding work in the field.  In 2012 he was joint recipient of the European Physical Society “EPS Edison Volta prize”, and more recently in June 2013 he has been awarded an OBE for services to science and technology as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Although not all proton–proton collisions have interesting characteristics that lead to discoveries, the more data the better the chances of spotting something new. ATLAS is improving its trigger system to be able to select even more collision events with potentially interesting physics.

"The Higgs boson discovery has changed the landscape and the focus is now on measuring its properties," says David Francis, Trigger and Data Acquisition System project leader. "ATLAS has defined what it wants to analyse as the highest priority and our improved trigger system will be optimised to select these events as much as possible."

Until now, the ATLAS trigger system consisted of three levels: Level 1, where decisions were made by specialised electronics within 2.5 microseconds after a collision occurred; Level 2, where specific regions of the events identified by Level 1 were analysed; and Event Filter, where entire events were analysed in full detail. Only a few thousand events per second made it from Level 2 to Event Filter, which in turn reduced the selection to about 400 events per second.

Detector electronics are being upgraded to increase the Level-1 event acceptance rate from 70 kHz to 100 kHz. To handle this new acceptance rate, the size of computer farms will also have to be increased. Plans to make the system more efficient include merging Level 2 and Event Filter, together with the introduction of a hardware-based topological trigger in Level 1, which raises the selectivity of events at the earliest stage.

This hardware is an electronics board developed especially for ATLAS and is an example of how trigger hardware is evolving to meet new challenges. The electronics board combines existing information using new criteria for selecting events on the basis of their angular and other correlations. The board’s selection capability will be very important in identifying potentially interesting physics from the increased amount of data. For instance, the newly announced ATLAS result of Higgs decaying into two tau leptons could profit from this.

"The trigger team coordinates with different physics groups in the collaboration to optimize the selections made," says Brian Petersen, former trigger coordinator and now a supersymmetry sub-group convener. “With more data for analysis, we have a better chance of finding the unknown."

Next year, the new trigger structure will be tested. If all goes well, when protons begin colliding again in the heart of the ATLAS detector, the trigger system will continue to select interesting data with high efficiency in an increasingly difficult environment.

Today at 10am in the Main Auditorium, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer will give his New Year presentation to CERN people. 

Simultaneous translation will be available in the Main Auditorium.

Closed-circuit transmission will be available in:

• BE (Meyrin and Prévessin) Auditoria,
• IT Auditorium,
• Kjell Johnsen Auditorium,
• Filtration Plant Building (222)

At the beginning of the month, physicist Joe Incandela, who led the CMS experiment during the discovery of the Higgs boson, handed the reins to his former deputy, CERN physicist Tiziano Camporesi.

For the next two years, Camporesi will oversee all aspects of CMS – one of the two general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider – from resource management to implementing detector upgrades to planning for the future.

"There will be a lot of challenges in the future," Camporesi says. "We are preparing for the next run of the LHC in 2015 to continue to search for new physics. In parallel, we also need to develop the technology to upgrade CMS so we can exploit the High Luminosity LHC [an upgrade to the LHC planned for around 2020] to its full potential."

Read more:"Former CMS deputy takes reins of experiment"– Symmetry

For Frédérick Bordry, the former head of the Technology (TE) department, the new year brings a new start as CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology. As passionate and enthusiastic as his predecessor Steve Myers, he tells us all about the three key areas of his role.

Exploitation of the machines

"I’m taking on the role of Director for Accelerators and Technology at a crucial time for CERN. This year, we’re going to restart all our non-LHC physics and the LHC injectors, which will allow us to restart the collider at 13 TeV energy next year.

LS1 is the priority for 2014. We still have a lot of work to do, but almost all the activities are well within schedule and we are sticking to our philosophy that safety comes first, then quality and finally the schedule.

Since the diversity of research is a fundamental aspect of CERN, I would like to highlight that non-LHC physics is also one of my priorities, in particular ISOLDE and the future HIE-ISOLDE project, n-TOF and its new experimental area (EAR2), the AD and its upcoming ELENA upgrade, and the work in the North Area, especially for NA62. All of these experiments are essential because they contribute to the diversity of particle physics research."

Construction project

"In terms of CERN’s short-term future, the special Council session for the approval of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, held in Brussels in May 2013, gave the go-ahead for a major construction project, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), to begin in the next decade. It’s an ambitious project as it will involve no less than 1.2 kilometres of the accelerator and is designed to increase the LHC’s integrated luminosity by a factor of ten!”

Future high-energy machines

"In addition to endorsing the HL-LHC construction programme, the European Strategy session also gave the green light for feasibility studies for two projects that will be fundamental for CERN’s future: the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a circular machine with a circumference of around 100 kilometres that would be capable of reaching an energy of 100 TeV.

We are aiming to present conceptual design studies for each of the two projects the next time the European Strategy for Particle Physics is updated, which is expected to happen in 2018 or 2019.

Of course, at some point, the scientific community will have to choose between the different options. The physics that emerges from the 13 TeV run of the LHC, starting in 2015, will show us what path to take and will give us an indication of which machine is better suited to answering the scientific questions that arise. That said, it’s clear that we can't wait to get the results from the LHC before launching the study phase, which is why we are going to continue with both studies in parallel.

I also think that, in our modern world, we have to think about sustainable energy. Every new study carried out at CERN must include a chapter on energy demonstrating that it is possible to combine energy efficiency with performance. We are currently already looking for concrete solutions for saving and recovering energy in our existing accelerators. 

I would like to conclude by saying that my mandate begins at a time when more than 1000 people are working on the LS1 machine consolidation, construction and maintenance of the infrastructure, etcetera, and their safety is our priority. LS1 has started very well and we hope to continue in the same way to ensure that we can restart non-LHC physics in 2014 and LHC physics in 2015, paving the way for our future projects."

After Vincent Vuillemin’s farewell last December, we are happy to introduce Sudeshna Datta-Cockerill, the new CERN Ombuds. Her mission is to help people find their own strategies to overcome issues in the working environment and to support them as needed.

Coming from the Human Resources department and, in particular, from the Diversity office, Sudeshna sees her new function as the CERN Ombuds as a natural evolution of the work she had been doing in her career. Sitting very comfortably in her welcoming office, we discuss her vision for the future.

The Ombuds mission is demanding. Why did you decide to accept the challenge?

Because I really value the role and believe in the need for a function that aims to resolve workplace issues informally and help to prevent them from escalating into more formal grievance procedures. Back in my time as equal opportunities officer, I strongly recommended the creation of an Ombuds office at CERN and I was really happy to see it finally take shape. So, when I was asked to take it over, I accepted the job not only because I believe that I can bring my previous experience in coaching and communication skills to the role but also because I know that it will be very satisfying if I am able to help people and the Organisation in this way.

In what way can the Ombuds help people?

The Ombuds is there for everybody regardless of contractual or hierarchical status. My role is to provide an impartial ear, to listen and to help people to gain a better perspective of the situation they are in and to identify ways in which they themselves can resolve the issues they face. Sometimes, just by verbalising a problem, one can really see aspects that one couldn’t see before. Often, when we are in a difficult situation, we tend to think that there is only one way out of it. Coming to the Ombuds will offer people an opportunity to discuss their problems in a safe environment and to explore different options, or strategies by which to address them. It is up to them to decide on the specific action that suits their situation best and I will provide them with any support they may need. If requested, I can also speak to the other party or facilitate a discussion between them. In all cases, they may count on my treating their situation with total confidentiality and impartiality.

Another aspect of my role is to see whether there are any systemic themes or common situations that I can bring to the attention of the Management, of course in a completely anonymous way.

Working with the same positive and constructive attitude as her predecessor, the new Ombuds has started the year with quite a busy agenda. However, "availability" is a key word for Sudeshna and, therefore, she invites you to contact her by e-mail as soon as a problem arises. "The earlier the better," she says. "For anything that you perceive as a problem, just don’t think that it is too small to come to the Ombuds." So, the Ombuds has changed but not the main messages.