DESY greets CERN

Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors, continues the series of occasional exchanges between CERN and other laboratories world-wide. As part of this exchange, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer wrote a message in DESY inForm. Helmut Dosch took over from Albrecht Wagner in March 2009.

You may think that the connections between CERN and DESY are obvious – particle physics labs with record-breaking accelerators and users from all around the world trying to solve mankind’s great mysteries. We even exchanged a few Directors. But did you know that there are similarities that are much closer to home – for example that both labs have names for their staff in the host language that are untranslatable into English? You are CERNoises and CERNois, we are DESYanerinnen and DESYaner. And in the end it’s the people it all comes down to.

We at DESY admire the resourcefulness, enthusiasm, dedication and perseverance with which you at CERN have designed, built, started up and now fixed the LHC. We are proud to contribute our share of people to the machine and the detectors, and we wish you and everybody in particle physics every success for the upcoming restart and a smooth learning curve towards first collisions that will open the door to a new era of knowledge. We look forward to seeing the first physics results from the LHC adventure!

Meanwhile, DESY is enjoying its own adventures in all three of our research areas: accelerators, photon science and particle physics. It’s our 50th birthday this year, our new lightsource PETRA III, the world’s most brilliant X-Ray storage ring, is complete and has already set a world record in lowest beam emittance, work on the European XFEL free-electron laser is progressing and we are just recovering from our Open Day on 7 November. 13000 visitors spent a day on the DESY campus, inspected the FLASH laser facility and the brand new experimental stations at PETRA III and even walked a section of the HERA tunnel, our biggest particle physics project so far. HERA has produced results that were fundamental to the design of the LHC and likewise the LHC will produce results that will determine the future of the field.

I hope that we will continue to work with and learn from each other and that there will always be many enthusiastic and dedicated CERNoises and CERNois and DESYanerinnen and DESYaner who make all these exciting things possible.