The original version of this interview features in the January 2014 issue of Soldier - the magazine of the British Army - and is reprinted with permission of the editor.

Lieutenant James Jackson (Image: Sergeant Dan Bardsley/ Crown Copyright)

A former CMS physicist turned British Army officer is putting college science syllabuses under the microscope in Kabul.

Lieutenant James Jackson, of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, is serving as a force protection troop leader, defending the Afghan media operations cell and any journalists that visit the capital. Jackson is a former particle physicist with the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and CMS collaboration at CERN.

During his tour, Lieutenant Jackson has been finding out more about the sort of science courses that are available to Afghan students with a view to passing on some of his knowledge to colleges there. "Their rough syllabus looks decent for undergraduates," he said. "I don't know to what level the topics are taught, so I'll be finding out more during my time here."

Lieutenant Jackson appears to have taken the overall transition from the scientific world to the military comfortably in his stride: "Both fields actually require a very similar mind set, so there is significant overlap," he said. "On the whole, those in the armed forces and research science are dynamic, adaptable, driven, not scared of uncertainty and keen to solve problems. This is one of the reasons why the move from science to soldiering was not as vast as you might expect."

The officer's efforts to work with local universities in Kabul shows he will never be free of his passion for science, though, and he still closely follows the work at CERN: "I can only hope that the Higgs is just the tip of the iceberg and that when more data is analysed my friends and ex-colleagues can tease out more of the universe's secrets," he added. "I'll continue to watch with interest."

FameLab is an international competition for young researchers aimed at discovering science communicators that can inspire, excite and engage the public with modern science.

CERN is hosting the Swiss regional heat of the competition on 27 March. Are you a scientist aged between 18 and 35, and working or studying in Switzerland? Sign up by 28 February.

Participants will need to impress a panel of judges by giving an original and entertaining 3-minute talk in English. The Swiss national winner will proceed to the international finals in the UK in June. All semi-finalists will be invited to attend a two-day masterclass in science communication to develop their presentation skills with media trainers and communications experts.

See the Swiss FameLab website for full competition details. 

In collaboration with CERN, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is holding the 12^th Industrial Exhibition “Germany at CERN” from 28 January through 29 January. Fifty-nine German companies will present their latest ideas and technologies for maintenance, renovation and expansion of the CERN accelerator complex to interested scientists and buyers.

It’s the first time an industrial exhibit is taking place in a (heated) tent just outside CERN’s restaurant, which was necessary to accommodate the largest gathering of German industrial representatives at CERN so far. The exhibitors specialize in a broad range of technical fields, with a majority of firms engaging in electronics and vacuums.

According to the German Industrial Liaison Officer Wolfgang Erdt, who is also coordinating the exhibit, there are already more than 260 meetings scheduled between interested parties at CERN and the German firms to discuss possible collaborations.

"The perspective of this event is to renew existing contacts, establish new links and find out about future collaboration possibilities. The High Luminosity upgrade at the LHC is a great opportunity also for those of the exhibitors that haven’t worked with CERN before," says Erdt.

The exhibit is open to visitors on Tuesday, 28 January from 11am to 5.30pm and on Wednesday, 29 January from 9am to 5pm.

The daily responsibilities of Lluis Miralles Verge, Head of the General Infrastructure Services (GS) department since August 2013, range from overseeing the CERN "master plan" and the construction of new buildings and infrastructures to managing the organization's roads and access to its different sites. However, he stresses that none of this is as fundamental to the smooth running of the laboratory as the people behind the services concerned.

Lluis Miralles worked as an engineer with the ATLAS collaboration and with various Spanish institutions before arriving at CERN last year (see CV), so he was no stranger to the complexities of working in a scientific environment. That is not to say that CERN did not hold any surprises for him! "When I took up the post of GS Department Leader I quickly realised just how complex the day-to-day running of a laboratory like CERN can be," he says. "My department alone comprises experts in logistics, project management and computing, as well as doctors and firemen."

Maintenance and consolidation of the existing infrastructure are key components of the department's activities. The department's experts, as requested by the management, are also working on new projects that could come to fruition at the laboratory over the next few decades. "The possible future construction of new machines requires feasibility studies and impact studies since they would not just affect CERN but would possibly have implications for the whole local area," says Miralles. "But the impact on the landscape during the construction phase would be limited as the work would be done underground. The possible future expansion of the CERN site would be more of an issue but we have not reached that stage yet."

Firmly anchored in the present but also forward looking, the GS department manages the practical daily needs of CERN personnel and users so smoothly that you may not even be aware of its presence. Every day, the laboratory's thousands of users and personnel are able to enter the site, make use of the import/export service, receive their mail, witness renovation work under way in various buildings, plan their leave, obtain scientific publications and send requests for assistance to the Service Desk, from which they can expect a prompt response. Behind all these services are the 296 members of the GS Department… at CERN, the infrastructures come second to the people behind them.

"CERN's strength lies in the professionalism of its personnel," says Miralles. "I appreciate the variety of opinions here and the freedom to express them. Sometimes, in my role as Department Leader, I'm obliged to come down in favour of one view over another, but the spirit of participation here at CERN is one of its defining features." 

To help you find out more about this multi-faceted department, we will be delving into the nooks and crannies of its different services in a series of Bulletin articles. The first, to be published in the next issue, will take a look at the CERN hostel which, with its 565 rooms, is larger than any other hotel in Geneva or the Pays de Gex and is also the most overbooked!

CERN will be celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year. That means 60 years of pioneering scientific research and exciting discoveries. Two Italian physicists, Maria and Giuseppe Fidecaro, remember nearly all of it since they arrived in 1956. Most impressively, they are still hard at work, every day!

The couple is easy to spot, even in the cafeteria during busy lunchtimes, where they usually engage in the liveliest discussions. "We argue quite a lot," Maria tells me with a big smile. "We have very different styles.""But in general, in the end, we agree," says Giuseppe.

In October 1954, Giuseppe went to the University of Liverpool as a CERN Fellow to do research with their brand new Synchrocyclotron. Maria also joined, having obtained a fellowship from the International Federation of University Women. After getting married in July 1955, they carried out experiments on pions, Giuseppe with a lead glass Cherenkov counter, Maria with a diffusion chamber.

In summer 1956, both moved to Geneva, and Maria got a CERN fellowship. "There were only about 300, maybe 400 people at CERN then," says Maria. A beautiful mansion called Villa de Cointrin housed the administrative offices on the airport premises, while physicists had their offices in nearby barracks.

Giuseppe was assigned to the Synchrocyclotron Division.  This was the first accelerator built at CERN and was operated from 1957 until 1990. Giuseppe set up a group and prepared the basic equipment for experiments that was used in 1958 for a successful search for pions decaying into an electron and a neutrino. This was a hot topic at the time and was the first experiment involving a CERN accelerator. "The news went all over the world overnight," recalls Giuseppe. Recently refurbished, the synchrocyclotron will soon become a permanent exhibit at CERN.

Meanwhile, Maria worked on a novel method to provide polarised proton beams. "It was just a mere 10 years after the end of the war. The war feelings were still very much there," she says. "But it was really easy to work with each other," says Giuseppe. "Everybody got along; we all had a common goal."

Although there were very few women when she started, Maria feels she was respected by her peers. "In my group, I was simply one of them," she says.

Today, long after most have retired, they have both chosen to remain active and are still doing research but of another style. Giuseppe delves in the history of physics while Maria is happy to revisit some of her past work, making sure she did not overlook any important detail. "In the heat of the moment, with the beams on and everything, there was no time to have a broad view," she says. "It’s a pleasure to go back and gain a deeper insight, and put our work in perspective with respect to what was going on at CERN and elsewhere."

Both agree: every moment was good. "Having gone through all of it for 60 years is what has been best," Maria says. "It was great to be able to pioneer so many different experiments," adds Giuseppe. "And to share work with so many interesting people."   

Maria confirms: "Life has been kind to us."

Every year more than 1000 high-school students from Norway visit CERN. Some of the teachers return with their classes year after year. Kongsberg videregående skole and Akademiet Drammen are two such schools. On their latest visit the teacher presented a remarkable token of appreciation to the CERN staff that welcomed them – personally designed pullovers with themes from the world of particle physics!

Knitting has a strong tradition in Norway and the technique found in today's wool sweaters has been practiced since the 9th century. The activity was practiced both by men and women up to around 1900. Since then the tradition has mainly been continued by women. 

Jolanta Nylund opted for a modern warm jumper with the CERN logo, while Inga Hanne Dokka made variations based on the famous  "lusekofte" (the name means "lice jacket", after the isolated coloured stitches).

Mick Storr, head of the Visit Service, has spent the last decade establishing links between CERN and high schools. "It has been a very enriching experience," he says. "The joint effort between the teachers and the Visiting Service is really paying off – high-school students today, across the members states, are far more informed about particle physics today than only some years back.”

Jens Vigen, a Norwegian CERN guide, remembers having knitted a tie himself when he was in the eight grade. It was a Solidarność-tie, the knot was white and the rest of it red, to show sympathy with the Polish striking workers in the early 1980’s.

Theorist John Ellis says: “It is truly a lovely gift. Everybody who has seen it has exclaimed how nice it is, and how well it suits me.”

Combining the power of science and art is an activity CERN has been pursing for several years – it seems like this now might also expand to the traditional handicrafts. Who would have imagined that a lusekofte could describe the BEH-mechanism?

The CERN Data Centre processes a staggering 1000 terabytes of data every day, which is the equivalent of around 210,000 DVDs. And, at peak times, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid may transfer as much as 10 gigabytes of data from its servers every second. However, CERN is not the only research organization dealing with such "big data". Ever-cheaper sensing and data-storage technologies are driving an explosion in data across many fields of science, as well as for businesses of all sizes.

Yesterday, CERN openlab invited research institutions and leading IT companies to participate in a workshop focused on the latest advances in data analytics. “Data analytics brings the promise of further increasing the efficiency of LHC operations, accelerating physics analysis, and preparing us for even more ambitious initiatives,” says Alberto Di Meglio of CERN openlab. “The next CERN openlab phase will lead us to the start of the next planned shutdown of the LHC (LS2) in 2018. This is an excellent opportunity for us to investigate new technical challenges with commercial partners and other European research laboratories.”

Presentations were given at the event by representatives of the invited IT companies and Africa Perianez of the German Meteorological Service spoke about how big data is driving advancements in weather prediction, while at the same time posing analytical challenges. Meanwhile, Nenad Buncic of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) gave a presentation on the Human Brain Project, an ambitious attempt to improve understanding of the brain by building a completely new type of computing infrastructure. Whereas at CERN scientific data is generated centrally by the LHC, the data for the Human Brain Project is produced by a host of smaller, distributed laboratories. “A lack of data sharing between labs is probably the biggest challenge in neuroscience,” says Buncic. “We are incentivizing labs to share data… but we need to make sure that data conforms to standards and that researchers speak a common vocabulary.”

Salim Ansari from the European Space Research and Technology Centre also gave a presentation on the vast amounts of data being generated by the European Space Agency’s fleet of Earth-observing and space-science satellites. He discussed how the operational efficiency of satellites can be improved by analyzing orbital data and explained how the concept of ‘predictive analytics’ is changing how astrophysical data is handled. “Analytics can play a major role in simplifying scientific research,” says Ansari. “Discovery tools can be automated, thus freeing the scientist from having to carry out much of the search for knowledge.”

Finally, CERN’s Johannes Gutleber gave a brief presentation on long-term studies into a potential successor to the LHC. While any such machine wouldn’t begin operations for at least another 20 years, it is important, says Gutleber, to think now about the computing infrastructures that will be required to analyze the huge data output. “We need to think about how the computing infrastructures are going to evolve. We need to build infrastructures that are going to survive the trends and fashions of computing today, while being flexible enough to incorporate future advancements in technology.”

CMS has many different safety systems installed in the underground experimental area. These are designed to protect the detector and all the associated electronics as well as the cavern itself. In case of fire, the last line of defence is the High Expansion Foam System.

Following the fire of 1999 in the Mont Blanc tunnel, CMS acknowledged that, as a similar deep-underground facility, it needed an extinguishing system that can be operated remotely, is completely passive (does not require pumps or electricity), can cope with a big fire in the cavern and, lastly, does not need the specialist intervention of fire fighters to be operated. The foam system was installed in 2006, with an Italian company called Kiddie Italia providing the components and ZEC, a Polish company, setting up the piping. The system is completely passive, relying on a 100 m water column between the surface reservoir and the underground cavern to provide the necessary pressure. In five minutes, 20 m³ of water mixes with foaming liquid to transform into 16,500 m³ of foam that fills the entire cavern.

Read more:“CMS to improve underground fire-extinguishing system” – CMS

Linac 4's PI-Mode Structures (PIMS) are the first structures of their kind to accelerate protons. Now, over three years after work began on production, over 180 PIMS elements have been rough-machined and the first new PIMS cavity is being assembled at CERN.

As the final accelerating structures of Linac 4, located 53 metres to 74 metres downstream of the source, the state-of-the-art PIMS cavities will take protons from 100 to 160 MeV. While the first cavity was built entirely at CERN, construction of the remaining cavities has become a larger, multi-national operation. The newest PIMS cavity is being assembled and validated at CERN's Main Workshop. Built in collaboration with the National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) in Poland and the Jülich Research Centre in Germany, it is the first of its kind to be produced outside the organization.

Sharing all the required know-how with the external centres proved a demanding task. To ensure the correct construction of these sensitive modules, members of the CERN Workshop and the Linac 4 accelerating structure team organized regular meetings in Poland and at CERN to provide support. "In weekly teleconference meetings the progress is reviewed, information is shared and difficulties are solved jointly," says Rolf Wegner, a member of the Linac 4 PIMS team who also developed the cavity's RF design. "Now most of the parts are routinely machined up to the final stage."

The Polish institute NCBJ made impressive progress in order to meet the demanding specifications. As the search for industrial partners for machining in Poland was not successful, only NCBJ was able to develop production methods to reach tolerances as tight as ±10 microns over a diameter of 540 millimetres.

Arriving from Poland part-by-part, it takes around six month to complete and test a PIMS cavity before it can be installed in Linac 4. Each cavity consists of seven coupled cells. In order to save copper, cells are formed by welding together eight discs and seven rings, each with a diameter of 0.5 metres. Together, these create 15 elements per cavity.

After metrology checks, the 15 elements are stacked up to a complete cavity and the RF parameters are determined. Discs are then re-machined on dedicated sections, so-called "tuning islands", to adjust the frequency. Once the frequency has been checked, all 15 elements are surface-treated for vacuum and joined together by electron beam welding. Then final RF adjustments and vacuum tests are performed before the cavity can be connected and high-power tested. Collaboration between many different CERN teams is essential in order to complete all these activities.

They are more than 100 of them in the LHC ring and they have a total of about 400 degrees of freedom. Each one has  motors and the newest ones have their own beam-monitoring pickups. Their jaws constrain the relativistic, high-energy particles to a very small transverse area and protect the machine aperture. The ultra-precise LHC collimators leave escaping unstable particles no chance.

Designed at CERN but mostly produced by very specialised manufacturers in Europe, the LHC collimators are among the most complex elements of the accelerator. Their job is to control and safely dispose of the halo particles that are produced by unavoidable beam losses from the circulating beam core. "The LHC collimation system has been designed to ensure that beam losses in superconducting magnets remain below quench limits in all operational phases," says Stefano Redaelli from the Beams Department who is Head of the LHC Collimation Project. "In view of the second, high-energy run of the LHC, it was decided to upgrade various aspects of the system. In particular, 18 collimators will be replaced with new ones based on an innovative design."

The collimation system for the LHC Run 2 will consist of a total of 118 devices, distributed in several places around the ring and in the transfer lines but mostly at the warm insertion regions around Points 3 and 7. Collimators are also installed close to the interaction points where beams are optimized for collisions. "By controlling the particle losses, the collimators protect the delicate elements of the machine, help reduce the total dose on the accelerator equipment and optimize the background for the experiments," says Redaelli.

The beam cleaning requirements at the LHC exceed those of previous machines by several orders of magnitude. In a collider, beam losses are caused by collisions at the interaction points, the interaction of the beam particles with residual gas, intra-beam scattering, beam instabilities and dynamics changes during the operation cycle (orbit drifts, optics changes, energy ramp, etc.). All these effects may vary over time, depending on various beam and machine parameters. Therefore, the collimation system must be very flexible and highly reliable. "Each ring collimator of the LHC is programmed to follow the changes in energy and optics during the operation cycle of the machine. The collimator aperture is varied according to the requirements, which depend on the specific functionality of each device," says Redaelli. "The jaws can move at a varying pace and can be controlled by the operators, who can also adjust their angle with respect to the beam trajectory. It is a very complex but very effective system, the state-of-the-art for hadron colliders."

In order to decrease the collimator set-up time and to control better the collimator centering around the beam, the newest collimators have been equipped with a dedicated beam monitoring system consisting of 4 pickups, 2 per jaw, located at each motor axis. "This new feature will help us monitor the position of the incoming beam 'live' and with increased precision," says Redaelli. "The design of the new collimators is the result of a close and fruitful collaboration between the BE, EN and TE Departments. The first four collimators – two internally produced and two produced in industry – have been accepted and are being prepared for installation." During LS1, the teams will replace 18 collimators, with priority given to those that protect the experiments. Future system upgrades will progressively improve other parts of the machine.

A version of this article first appeared in UK News from CERN.

Taking particle physics to new audiences is often easier said than done. But Kate Shaw, the newly elected outreach co-coordinator for the ATLAS collaboration, has an enviable track record.

As the founder of the Physics without Frontiers project at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, she has been working with students in Algeria, Egypt and Palestine to inspire and motivate them to consider a career in particle physics.

"I’ve loved physics since I was 12," says Shaw. "To me it’s really important to reach out to people who don’t have the same access; we don’t know where the next Albert Einstein or Abdus Salam is going to come from."

Shaw's passion for outreach was kindled during her PhD at Sheffield in the UK. She volunteered at workshops and science festivals before winning an STFC Science and Society Small Award to take particle-physics masterclasses to hard-to-reach schools in the city. From Sheffield, she joined ICTP, which carries out physics research and promotes physics in developing countries.

Physics without Frontiers has only been going since 2012 but Shaw and her colleagues have already seen positive outcomes. PhD students act as role models to younger students, and have the opportunity to start building professional networks that will help and support these physicists throughout their careers. One student is currently studying for her diploma at ICTP with several currently applying, and a number of students have been accepted into the CERN summer-student programme. Many more are applying for Masters’ courses and a PhD student will work at CERN for his PhD.

Shaw says she is confident that Physics without Frontiers is in safe hands as she starts her next challenge as ATLAS outreach co-coordinator, which will take up to half of her time.

"ATLAS is already doing fantastic outreach and reaching a very wide audience," she says. "But I'm hoping to increase the focus on developing countries and the general public. When we start taking data again in 2015, we need a clear message about our next challenges and what we’re trying to achieve at the frontiers of particle physics.”

Shaw is looking forward to being based full-time at CERN. Alongside her outreach activities, she’ll be analysing data and studying Higgs physics. She’ll also be working as part of the Luminosity Task Force. So which does this new co-ordinator prefer – outreach or research? “I have to do both," she says. "I need to do outreach to enjoy the physics, but I need to do the physics to enjoy the outreach!”

Today at 3pm CET, CERN and UN Geneva are holding a roundtable discussion about the challenges of communicating science.

Watch the webcast live here at 3pm CET

For more details see: https://indico.cern.ch/event/301080/.

Agenda

CERN is hosting a Raspberry Pi programming day on 12 April 2014. The event includes a hands-on workshop and a series of presentations of different projects with the Raspberry Pi. The presentations and workshop provide an ideal introduction for beginners and information for those with more advanced computer programming skills. Basic programming techniques will be discussed using Scratch, Python and C, through a set of worked examples and additional electronics. The electronics examples will include a LEGO NXT interface, other expansion boards and a variety of basic I/O components and sensors.

This event is free, but it is necessary to sign up to be able to attend. If you would like to present a project or bring your Raspberry Pi project to discuss in the tutorial session, please also email raspberry.pi@cern.ch with the details of your presentation or project.

How about if, for a change, you forgot your lunch meeting and went to the movies with your colleagues (or that person that you always wanted to ask out) right here on the CERN site?

CERN will be hosting the next CineGlobe International Film Festival from 18 to 23 March in the Globe of Science and Innovation, with the theme "Beyond the Frontier". The 4th annual festival will see 66 short films "inspired by science" in competition, including fiction films as well as documentaries.

From Tuesday 18 to Friday 21, lunch sessions will take place from 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Food will be available for purchase at the “Café Cinéma” tent next to the Globe.

Special evenings

While the short film screenings are the heart of the festival, each year CineGlobe also organises compelling special events every night, from feature films to special musical performances:

• Tuesday 18 March: The Swiss premiere of the acclaimed documentary film Particle Fever. Presented by BBC Storyville with Fabiola Gianotti and director Mark Levinson in attendance;
• Wednesday 19 March: The result of the “Story Matter” Hackathon, the first-ever international summit to create new media stories with technology and science, an event organised in collaboration with the renowned Tribeca Film Institute in New York;
• Thursday 20 March: A panel of Internet privacy and security experts will discuss the question: how close are we to Orwell’s nightmare in this day and age? The British band Teeth of the Sea will then perform live their original, CineGlobe-commissioned, audio-visual musical interpretation of George Orwell’s 1984, 30 years after the legendary date;
• Friday 21 March: A collection of short films on Mapping Art accompanied by a unique interactive dance performance by CENC with LED installations, presented by the Geneva Mapping Festival; All weekend: screenings of short films and a special night on Saturday evening dedicated to the CineGlobe awards ceremony.

The films in competition will be screened at lunchtimes and in the early evenings from Tuesday to Friday and all day at the weekend. Entry to all sessions is free. Note that special nights will require a reservation, via www.cineglobe.ch.

All programmes will be presented in French and English. The full schedule is available on the festival's website.

By successfully passing a recent ‘Master Cold Test’, the CMS experiment Tracker has proved it can run at temperatures colder than ever before. It is now in shape to operate until 2025.

This Tracker – the closest subdetector to the collision point of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle beams – must face an onslaught of billions of particles flying through it each second of operation. If the Tracker was operated at room temperatures, damage from this onslaught would soon render it inoperable. So during the LHC’s first run from 2010 to 2013, the Tracker operated at +4 °C. But with higher LHC beam intensities from 2015 onwards, the Tracker must operate at much colder temperatures, posing a monumental challenge to the Tracker community. However, after two years of planning and one year of work, they have succeeded.

To achieve lower temperatures, many projects ran in parallel. The CMS cooling plant was refurbished and the fluorocarbon cooling system completely overhauled. New methods for vapour-sealing and insulation helped suppress humidity inside the Tracker and several hundred high-precision sensors have improved humidity and temperature monitoring. A new dry-gas plant now provides eight times as much dry gas (air or nitrogen) than before to help keep humidity away from the delicate electronics, and allows fine-grained regulation of the flow. In addition, all cooling bundles outside the Tracker were equipped with heater wires and temperature sensors to guarantee safe operation in the future. 

As a result, in early 2014 the Tracker successfully passed the important ‘Master Cold Test’ milestone, running the Strip Tracker at temperatures down to −20 °C with the Pixel Tracker lines going to −25 °C. The subdetector was monitored continuously and performed as expected, without affecting the temperature of surrounding layers of the Electromagnetic Calorimeter, which operate at +18 °C.
Environmental conditions allow operation at −25 °C and the detector has been successfully operated at −20 °C. To minimise thermal stress, researchers are discussing operating the Strip Tracker at −15 °C and the Pixel Tracker at −20 °C for the coming years.

With this milestone, the Tracker project has completed the bulk of its work for Long Shutdown 1 of the LHC. The detector can now be operated cold with a sufficient safety margin. The team are now ready to track particles until Long Shutdown 3!

Submitted by Nicola Bacchetta, Erik Butz, Francesco Palmonari, Antti Onnela and Frank Hartmann

Sixty years ago, a handful of European scientists saw their dream of cooperation come true. Thanks to their efforts, nations which had been torn apart during the war came together to create the first European scientific organisation. Having lived through bombing, destruction, death and genocide, they regarded European integration as vital to the survival of their respective nations. Their goal was for their domain to participate in the general efforts towards reconstruction and peace. They successfully rose to the challenge and CERN became one of the world’s most prestigious research laboratories.

Among these early activists was a diplomat, François de Rose. At the ripe old age of 103, the former French ambassador is the last founding father of CERN. His memoirs will be published during the year in which CERN is celebrating its 60th anniversary. A significant part of these memoirs, entitled “Un diplomate dans le siècle”, is devoted to CERN, which he proudly described as the most beautiful feather in his ambassador’s cap.

With a twist on the words of Charles Aznavour in “La Bohème”, he recounts with his typical humour “un temps que les moins de cent ans ne peuvent pas connaître” (a time that those who are not centenarians cannot know about), a time when he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Niels Bohr, Pierre Auger and Robert Oppenheimer, the great names of particle physics. He relates, in particular, his meeting with Robert Oppenheimer and the French physicists who convinced him to embrace the CERN cause.

In addition to these chapters on CERN, the book contains a bountiful supply of anecdotes concerning twentieth century diplomacy. From his world of speeches and receptions, he brings us encounters, happy – and not so happy – hazards of fate, sound bites and the little stories that all combine to make up history.

We are delighted that his memoirs, originally written for his family, have finally been published for us all to savour and enjoy.

The book by François de Rose is available in the CERN Library.

To meet the world energy needs, systematic R&D has to be pursued to replace fossil fuels. The ThEC13 conference organized by iThEC at CERN last October has shown that thorium is being seriously considered by developing countries as a key element of their energy strategy. Developed countries are also starting to move in the same direction. How thorium could make nuclear energy (based on thorium) acceptable to society will be discussed. Thorium can be used both to produce energy and to destroy nuclear waste. As thorium is not fissile, one elegant option is to use an accelerator, in so-called “Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)”, as suggested by Carlo Rubbia.

CERN’s important contributions to R&D on thorium related issues will be mentioned as well as the main areas where CERN could contribute to this field in the future.

Watch the live webcast here at 4.30pm CET

Former ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti announces the change to Comic Sans (Video: CERN)

From today, all of CERN's official communication channels are switching to exclusive use of the font Comic Sans. The move comes after weeks of deliberation by CERN management and top web designers about how best to update the image of the laboratory for this, its 60^th anniversary year.  

Read more:"CERN to switch to Comic Sans"

Due to the steadily increasing number of cars on Meyrin site and the limited number of parking space new parking rules will be enforced at all gates as of April 1st. From that date on, only cars whose last digit on the number plate is odd (even) are allowed to enter the CERN site on odd or even days, respectively. LHC points are not affected.

Cars with the "wrong" last digit will be denied access by the guardians and would have to be parked outside CERN premises. Alternatively, people are asked to use the TPG tram, the Y bus (especially from direction St. Genis/Thoiry), or take their bike ("MOVE!"). Parking exceptions are handled on a case-by-case basis; applications should be sent to parking.service@cern.ch. Please include a justification and attach a scan of your valid driving license to that application. People with disabilities are exempt from these new rules.

The CERN Parking Service

Arts @ CERN is delighted to invite you to the Council Chamber at 1pm and meet Alberto Di Fabio, who will be giving a presentation.

Di Fabio was born in Avezzano in 1966, and studied at the Academia delle Belle Arti in Rome, Italy. His paintings and works on paper merge the worlds of art and science, depicting natural forms and biological structures in vivid colour and imaginative detail. Throughout his abstract images, the artist has developed and expanded his interest in the natural world, with early works dealing with the structures of flora and fauna, as well as eco and astral systems. Di Fabio's more recent paintings have focused on genetics and DNA, the synaptic receptors of the brain, moving his work into the realm of pharmaceutical and medical research.

As a special request by the German National Academic Foundation, at 3pm today in the CERN Main Auditorium, CERN's cultural specialist Ariane Koek will be giving a presentation about the CERN Arts programme.