A boost to visits


Several guides were rewarded by CERN's Director-General and Secretary-General for their contributions in 2004. Left to right: Géraldine Chuste, the Director-General Robert Aymar, Klaus Batzner, Philippe Moret, Joanna Weng, Alberto Ribon, Head of the Visits Service, Emma Sanders, and the Secretary-General, Maximilian Metzger. Three other guides not in the photograph, Antonio Francano, Christoph Ilgner and Tzanko Spassoff, were also rewarded for their contributions.


As every year, the CERN Visits Service has paid tribute to its guides, all of whom are volunteers and devote some of their time to showing people around their Laboratory. The guides were invited to a get-together in Microcosm during which the Director-General, Robert Aymar, expressed his special gratitude for their efforts and presented awards to the most dedicated among them. He encouraged members of the Laboratory to become guides and underlined that 2004 had been an exceptional year for visits, which had risen by 15% to almost 22,000. Including the Open Day and visits to the Microcosm Exhibition, CERN welcomed more than 60,000 visitors last year. The visits are an essential window on the outside world for CERN, allowing it to improve the general public's awareness of the focus, objectives and spin-offs of its research activities. The role of the guides is therefore extremely important.

With the launch of three new visit itineraries, 2005 also looks like being a very good year. Two of the itineraries will enable visitors to discover one of the most fascinating aspects of CERN, its underground experiments for the Large Hadron Collider. Since mid-February, groups have in fact already been able to venture 100 metres below ground to visit LHCb and see the barrel of DELPHI, the former LEP experiment, which can still be seen at Point 8. Soon, visitors will be given access to the monumental ATLAS cavern, where they will experience what it is like to feel as small as ants. Finally, the Compass experiment is also preparing to open its doors to visitors. The visit to Compass will reveal a detector of a completely different type and shed light on another aspect of particle physics. With its accordion-like structure, the experiment is sixty metres long and ten metres high and investigates fixed-target collisions with the aim of better understanding the structure of hadrons.

These three new itineraries are in addition to the existing tours of the PS, the Antiproton Decelerator and the CMS surface assembly hall, and will replace the tour of the ATLAS assembly hall in Building 180.

If you are interested in becoming a guide, please contact Sophie Baillard: guides.secretariat@cern.ch.

Prospective guides receive communication training and learn more about the Laboratory.