Philippe Bloch: Reducing distance between experiments and CERN

With its unique combination of several hundred staff members and thousands of users from around the world sharing offices and physics data and profiting from mutually beneficial exchanges of know-how and expertise, the PH Department is a good example of a successful worldwide collaboration, set up as it was to construct and run the Laboratory’s physics experiments.



The PH Depart-ment has always played host to thousands of users that contribute to CERN experiments and work on them, and whose numbers are set to grow in the years to come. With his long-standing experience as a user and then as the head of the CERN group within the CMS collaboration, Philippe Bloch, the new PH Department Head, is in favour of closer links between the Department and the experiments. "I think that the PH management should have a direct link to the experiments, and to do so we are holding regular management team meetings comprising members of the Department’s management and the experiments, along with one person who works in technology transfer. Furthermore, we are setting up in the Department a new team of engineers and technicians specialised in the domain of detector cooling to provide support to the EN Department team, because we realised that the resources needed were underestimated, which could cause difficulties for the experiments."

Being the entry point for users requires very effective logistics, and, above all, a lot of flexibility, because the flow of visitors varies enormously during the year and is not easy to predict. To meet the challenge of optimising the management of offices and associated services, the PH Department invented the concept they call "burhotel". Philippe Bloch explains: "This refers to an open-plan office space with a number of work stations, all of which are equipped with network access. We set up the first prototype of a burhotel in Building 510, which was used by summer students in 2008. Now we want to improve the concept and reproduce it elsewhere, so that it becomes standard practice for resolving the space problems associated with hosting visitors."

The PH Department owes its excellent performance to the users, but also to its CERN staff, whose numbers have drastically diminished in recent years. "To provide high-quality support, it is essential that we keep staff numbers at least at their present level. We have requested an increase in the number of limited-duration slots for research physicists in order to retain our expertise in data analysis and to maintain our leadership in cutting-edge physics research. We are also expecting to increase the number of fellows, thanks to a funding project in partnership with the European Commission," he adds.

The main objective for PH in 2009 is clearly to get a rapid start on the production phase and analysis of the LHC data which will soon be available. "All the experiments are very well prepared, ready for the LHC to start up again. We are also directly helping the teams of other departments who are working on the machine repairs. For example, members of the PH Department are sharing their skills in the production of digital cards that will be used in the quench protection system," he adds.

Thanks to a very mixed community of scientists, the PH Department is well aware of the importance of diversity in its activities. As Philippe Bloch says: "There are new experiments starting up in the AD (AEGIS, which will study antimatter gravity), in PS (CLOUD, which will study the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation) and SPS (NA62, for rare kaon decays). For May, CERN is organising for the first time a workshop on diversity in the scientific programme, which could give rise to new ideas to be developed further. We have also created a new group to work on detector systems for the CLIC or ILC linear colliders."

Does he have a special wish for the future? "The PH Department is very large, and encompasses a broad range of activities. So I think that some work has to be put into communication, to make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It would be nice to develop a sense of community and get to know each other better," is his conclusion.

More information:

http://ph-dep.web.cern.ch/ph-dep/

New opportunities in physics:

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=51128

Philippe Bloch’s CV in brief

An experimental physicist, Philippe Bloch studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He worked for a number of years at CEA/Saclay, during which time he collaborated on the UA2 experiment, among others. In 1984 he was awarded the Frédéric Joliot-Curie prize from the Société Française de Physique, and that same year he became a member of the CERN personnel. Between 1985 and 1997 he worked on the CPLEAR experiment, for which he was named head of the CERN group in January 1995. Starting in 2002 he headed the electromagnetic calorimeter project within the CMS experiment and since January 2007 he has led the CERN group in the CMS collaboration.