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Just one year ago, CERN took delivery of its first bi-fuel vehicles (see article in Bulletin 07-08/2011). Today, the fleet comprises 100 vehicles capable of running with petrol or natural gas. At that time, Véronique Marchal, head of the Site Services section in the GS Department, told us: “We are counting on CERN car users’ environmental awareness to use natural gas fuel whenever possible.” Observations one year later show that... well, let’s say there is still plenty of room for improvement. A new awareness campaign has therefore been launched.
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The big news this week is, of course, the conclusions from the LHC performance workshop held in Chamonix from 6 to 10 February . The main recommendation, endorsed by CERN’s Machine Advisory Committee and adopted by the Management, is that the LHC will run at 4 TeV per beam this year. You can find all the details from Chamonix in the slides presented on Wednesday at the summary session, which leaves me free to talk about another important development coming up soon.
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After more than two months since its stop in December, the LHC is slowly coming back from its hibernation - even if the temperature of the magnets in the tunnel has actually been getting lower and lower in recent days. The tunnel has been crowded with hundreds of people, busy with maintenance activities and preparations for the restart. The end of most activities (and the access to the tunnel) is scheduled for 21 February. On this date, the Operations team will take back ownership of the machine from the Programmed Stops Coordination team and push forward the preparations for the beam.
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A new EU-funded research network, LA³NET, is bringing together universities, research centres and industry partners worldwide to explore the use of laser technology in particle beam generation, acceleration and diagnostics. As one of the network partners, CERN will be hosting three early stage researchers in the BE and EN Departments.
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In the sixties, CERN’s Fellows were but a handful of about 50 young experimentalists present on site to complete their training. Today, their number has increased to a record-breaking 500. They come from many different fields and are spread across CERN’s different activity areas.
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2011 was a fantastic year for the heavy-ion run at ALICE despite unprecedented challenges and difficult conditions. The data collected is at least one order of magnitude greater than the 2010 data. Thanks to a planned upgrade to two subdetectors during the 2011/2012 winter shutdown and a reorganisation of ALICE’s Physics Working Groups that should allow them to better deal with the greater challenges imposed by the LHC, the collaboration is confident that the 2011 run will allow ALICE to extend its physics reach and improve its performance.
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Particle physics research has many unique needs and sometimes has to create its own expertise to keep its systems running. For specialised areas like cryogenics and high-voltage technology, labs often run their own training courses. In line with this trend, CERN has started a series of International Trigger and Data Acquisition (ISOTDAQ) Schools. 2012 has seen the third ISOTDAQ School, which generated a lot of enthusiasm among the future generation of TDAQ experts.
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A few weeks ago, the skylight at the top of the Globe was fitted with "smart glass". The new glazing will allow the intensity of the light in the auditorium to be adjusted, thus solving the problem of sunlight reflecting on the giant screen during the day.
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e-EPS News is a monthly addition to the CERN Bulletin line-up, showcasing articles from e-EPS – the European Physical Society newsletter – as part of a collaboration between the two publications.
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As part of a training initiative funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, 17 new Fellow positions have just been opened with three positions at CERN and the remainder around Europe. The mission is to contribute to the development of key sections of the ATLAS tracker upgrade.
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Err. Wait. Please no! USB sticks are not innocent little things. They can quickly mutate into malicious nasty beasts! Just in the recent past, at least two physics experiments were suffering as their control and data acquisition PCs, respectively, were infected by USB sticks holding malicious code. A bit longer ago, a series of laptops were infected at a 2008 computing conference as an infected USB stick made its tour around. Bad luck for those who ran a Windows operating system and inserted that stick…
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In this series, the Bulletin aims to explain the role of the Ombuds at CERN by presenting practical examples of misunderstandings that could have been resolved by the Ombuds if he had been contacted earlier. Please note that, in all the situations we present, the names are fictitious and used only to improve clarity.
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SPIE (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is a not-for-profit international society which publishes one of the largest collections of applied optics and photonics research papers in the world: the SPIE Digital Library.
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The CERN theory community mourns the loss of André Petermann, one of the first members of the Theory Division, who passed away last August in his 89th year. He pioneered, together with his advisor Stueckelberg, the renormalization group, one of the fundamental ideas in quantum field theory that underlies the modern theory of phase transitions as well as asymptotic freedom and the quest for unification of all the particle interactions.
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