The morning session on Friday 10 February - the final day of the workshop - saw further examination of the challenges of the High Luminosity LHC and included a look at the state of R&D; for the new magnets required for the high luminosity interaction regions.
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On a relatively warm Thursday morning in Chamonix (-7 Celsius) the workshop looked at what things would be like after the upcoming long shutdown (LS1 - 2013/14). A large number of re-training quenches of the LHC dipoles will be required in order to reach the nominal energy of 7 TeV so the beam energy in the first years after LS1 is expected to be around 6.5 TeV. The planned injector upgrades will not have been deployed at this stage, but the injector performance still looks capable of supplying sufficient beam quality to enable the LHC to reach the design luminosity of 1x1034 cm-2s-1.
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Outside it's a little warmer but Wednesday was spent inside looking forward to the long shutdown (LS1) planned for 2013/14.
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Tuesday's sessions were spent looking ahead to the possibilities for 2012. The morning started with the experiments' desiderata for the year with the key requirement being either discovery of Higgs or exclusion at the 95% confidence level down to 115 GeV. To achieve this Atlas and CMS will need an integrated luminosity in the order of 15 fb-1.
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Yesterday, 6 February, the LHC Performance workshop 2012 kicked off in a very chilly Chamonix (-12 degrees C in town at midday, nearer -30 on the top of Les Grand Montets). The first day was devoted to a critical review of 2011.
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CMS, one of the two gigantic international collaborations running experiments at the LHC, has recently appointed its new management. The new spokesperson and his two deputies are well aware of the pressure associated with holding such high positions during such a historic time for particle physics. Although their focus is on the Higgs, they anticipate that other areas of CMS’ multi-purpose research programme might become equally as intriguing this year.
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The job of CERN Director-General comes with a lot of responsibility, and that’s particularly true today. We’re living through a period of unique circumstances for science. Positive indicators, such as a renewal of interest in physical sciences at the University level and unprecedented public interest in the LHC, are aligning with storm clouds in the form of a prolonged economic crisis that will put downward pressure on everyone’s budgets.
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Maintenance and consolidation work has been progressing well in both the machine and the experiments in preparation for the March restart.
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"Never before in the field of science journalism have so few journalists understood what so many physicists were telling them!" tweeted the UK Channel 4’s Tom Clarke from last December’s Higgs seminar. As a consequence, most coverage focused on debates over the use of the label “god particle” and the level of excitement of the physicists (high), whilst glossing over what this excitement was actually all about.
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Every year, CERN's surveyors take detailed measurements to check the alignment of the LHC components. This year, from 16 to 18 January, they took some of those measurements for the first time using a brand-new remotely controlled train in one of the long straight sections.
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The next generation of antihydrogen trapping devices, ALPHA-2, is moving into CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD) hall. This brand-new experiment will allow the ALPHA collaboration to conduct studies of antimatter with greater precision. ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst was recently awarded a grant by the Carlsberg Foundation, which will be used to purchase equipment for the new experiment.
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Over recent years, the traditional author list has been joined by a new kid on the block: a signatory list, used by projects ranging from TESLA to SuperB, and soon to be joined by CLIC. What’s the difference?
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In the last issue of the Bulletin, the Director-General announced the name of the winner of the architectural competition for the design of the sections of the CERN site adjacent to the route de Meyrin. In this issue, we invite you to take a detailed look at the winning project.
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The third in the series of CERN-UNESCO African Schools on Digital Libraries took place in Dakar, Senegal, in November last year. The School represents an important opportunity for CERN to contribute to a global exchange of knowledge, skills and culture.
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Professor Guido Altarelli, a physicist at CERN and the University of Rome, has received two prizes since the beginning of the year: the Julius Wess prize awarded by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Sakurai prize awarded by the American Physical Society.
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Late last year, Julius von Bismarck was appointed to be CERN's first "artist in residence" after winning the Collide@CERN Digital Arts award. He’ll be spending two months at CERN starting this March but, to get a flavour of what’s in store, he visited the Organization last week for a crash course in its inspiring activities.
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The “Universe of Particles” exhibition in CERN’s Globe wins the silver design prize from the German direct business communications association FAMAB.
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What unites The Strokes, Gilbert and Sullivan, Brian Eno and Alpine Kat? All of them have in some way been musically connected with CERN. German composer of electronic music, Bernd Kistenmacher, is the latest in the long list of musicians to have been inspired by CERN.
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From 20 to 22 January pupils from international schools in Switzerland, France and Turkey came to CERN for three days of "UN-type" conferences.
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Training personnel, including evacuation guides and shifters, checking procedures, improving collaboration with the CERN Fire Brigade: the first real-life evacuation drill at CMS took place on Friday 3 February from 12p.m. to 3p.m. in the two caverns located at Point 5 of the LHC.
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After 20 years of continuous operation, the gravitational-wave detector Explorer has reached the end of its long career at CERN. On 23 January it set off for a new life at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Cascina, near Pisa.
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You might have heard about Botnets, i.e. networks of infected (Windows) computers which are unwittingly under control by a malicious party. Public examples of botnets-in-action are attacks against the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, or against Universal and Warner Music as a retaliation for the shutdown of Megaupload.com. But have you ever heard of a Botnet made of Android phones?
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“It is nighttime on a Swiss highway. A car travels at high speed, heading to Marseilles. Pietro Leone, UN Geneva civil servant, is at the wheel. His son Nico is asleep next to him. The two are fleeing from something unknown...
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At the end of November the particle physics community lost one of its most inquisitive, enthusiastic and active members when Milla Baldo Ceolin, emeritus professor at the University of Padua, passed away after several months of disabling illness.
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