What is CERN, fundamental research and recent discoveries, technology and applications

1. WELCOME TO CERN
Giuseppe Lo Presti
IT Department
European Organization for Nuclear Research
“Magic is not happening at CERN, magic is being explained at CERN”
(Tom Hanks)

2. Your Visit to CERN
Agenda
 Presentation (about 45 minutes), including a short movie
 Visit (about 2 hours)
 By bus, to the experimental areas
Practical info
 Do ask questions!
 You can take pictures or movies anywhere
 The Microcosm and Globe exhibitions are open until 5pm
 WC at the reception and in the experimental areas
2Visit to CERNGiuseppe Lo Presti

3. CERN in Numbers
 1954: foundation year, as an European Council
 22 Member States, 3 Associates, 4 Observers, UE + UNESCO…
 50+ Non-member States collaborate with CERN
 2300 staff members work at CERN as personnel,
12 000 researchers come from institutes world-wide
 1000 MEUR annual budget (2015)
 5 Nobel Prizes (…6 with Englert & Higgs)
3Visit to CERNGiuseppe Lo Presti

4. The Mission of CERN
Push back the frontiers of knowledge
E.g. the secrets of the Big Bang …what was the matter like
within the first moments of the Universe’s existence?
Develop new technologies for
accelerators and detectors
Information technology - the Web and the GRID
Medicine - diagnosis and therapy
Train scientists and engineers of
tomorrow
Unite people from different countries
and cultures 4Visit to CERNGiuseppe Lo Presti

5. Science Tools

6. Tools at CERN
 To perform Physics research,
we need:
 Accelerators
 Detectors
25% of the man power
6Visit to CERNGiuseppe Lo Presti

7. Tools at CERN
 …And to build them, we need
a great deal of technology!
 Civil engineering, special
materials, super freezers,
magnets, vacuum, information
techology, firemen, ...
75% of the man power!
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Example: LHC maintenance, 2013/14
 5000 people involved, 2000 newcomers
 Thousands of kms of cables and pipes
 Hundreds of tons of material…

8.  The Standard
Model:
 A mathematical
description of
all we observe
What we know…
Visit to CERNGiuseppe Lo Presti 8

9. Hubble Deep Field 2015
What is the Universe made of?
…but that’s not all!
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And where is antimatter gone?
Visit to CERN
The first antiparticle, called positron (anti-
electron), was predicted by Paul Dirac in
1930 and discovered two years after!
95% of its content is yet
completely unknown!

10. Huge instrumentation for tiny particles…
 The only way we know to produce new
particles is:
 Take a charged and stable particle and provide
enough energy accelerating it with electric fields
 Make it collide with a fixed target or, better, with
another particle travelling from the opposite
direction
 Part of the available energy turns into mass
(E = mc2), that is in new particles
 Colliding particles helps us
recreating the conditions in place
at the time of the Big Bang
 To accelerate more we need
larger and larger
accelerators… Giuseppe Lo Presti 10Visit to CERN

11. Particle accelerators at CERN
 1957: first proton sincro-
ciclotron, 15.7 m
Giuseppe Lo Presti 11Visit to CERN
 1954-59: PS, Proton
Sincrotron, 628 m
…remember π ?

12. Particle accelerators at CERN
 1971-73: SPS, Super
Proton Sincrotron,
6.9 km
Giuseppe Lo Presti 12Visit to CERN
 1981-89: LEP, Large
Electron-Positron
collider, 27 km

13. Particle accelerators at CERN
Giuseppe Lo Presti 13Visit to CERN
 1981-89: LEP, Large
Electron-Positron
collider, 27 km
 1994-2008: LHC, Large
Hadron Collider
 1971-73: SPS, Super
Proton Sincrotron,
6.9 km

14. The Large Hadron Collider
Lake of Geneva
Airport
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15. The Large Hadron Collider
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16. The Large Hadron Collider
~100m
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17. LHC: some numbers…
Circumference 26 659 m
Superconductors temperature 1.9 K (-271.3ºC)
Superconductors electrical parameters 11.7 KA, < 10 nΩ per junction
Number of magnets 9593, out of which 1232 dipoles
Energy stored by the magnets 10 GJ
Nominal energy, protons 6.5 TeV
Nominal energy, Pb 522 TeV
Magnetic field intensity, dipoles 8.33 T
Distance between two bunches ~15 m (50 ns), ~7 m from 2015
Nominal luminosity (beam intensity) 1034 cm–2 s–1
Number of bunches in the beam (p) ~1400, 2808 from 2015
Number of protons per bunch 1,5 x 1011
Weight of all protons in the beam 0.5 ng
Total nominal energy of the beam 460 MJ (a TGV at 140 km/h)
Number of orbits per second 11 245
Bunch crossing rate 40 MHz (>30 collisions/bunch)
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18. 14
The 27 km ring is sensitive to
changes in length in the order
of just 1 mm
Tides
Stray
currents
Storms
LHC
Precision!
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Far away tsunamis

19. The LHC detectors
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ATLAS CMS
LHCb

20. The LHC detectors
20Visit to CERN
ATLAS CMS
LHCb

21. A task for each one
ALICE
ATLAS
CMS
Higgs Boson
Supersymmetry
Matter – antimatter
Asymmetry
Quark-gluon Plasma
Heavy ion collisions
A Toroidal LHC
ApparatuS
Compact Muon
Solenoid
LHC beauty
A Large Ion
Collider
Experiment
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22. Some samples of what we see…

23. A huge amount of data
…But is it what we’re looking for?
On top, we make 500+ Million collisions per second to find
a few Higgs particles per day!
Giuseppe Lo Presti 23Visit to CERN
And the enormous background noise forces us to collect data for a
long time, before having statistically significant measurements
This is how a typical
collision looks like…
But we are looking for
this signal!

24. The LHC data flow
Giuseppe Lo Presti 24
For each
experiment...
Visit to CERN

25. Giuseppe Lo Presti 25
The LHC data flow
 Run 2: 1 kHz to be recorded by each
experiment
 Event size:
 ~ 1.5 MB “raw” for ATLAS or CMS,
~ 4-5 MB after online reconstruction
 ~ 80 MB for ALICE with Pb-Pb collisions
 Typical LHC data flows: 1.5 GB/sec for each
experiment, 8 GB/s ALICE. And LHC is not
alone…
 Total data in one month (July 2016):
10 PB (1015 Bytes) of data
 11+ Km of CDs
 20+ years of Blu-ray HD movies!

26. Giuseppe Lo Presti Visit to CERN
The Grid to process all the data
 Interconnecting Computer Centres world-wide to
share computing, storage, and network resources
 CERN is the main hub
 Not only for Physics!
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27. Practical applications: Medicine
27Giuseppe Lo Presti Visit to CERN
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)Positron Emission
Tomography (PET)
Hadron therapy

28. More practical applications
 Engineering
 The Web, radioactive waste handling,
detectors for customs checks
 Bioinformatics
 Human genome and proteome
 Nanotechnology
 Design of new materials at molecular scale
 Environment
 Simulations and weather forecasts, Earth
studies, natural disasters handling, …
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Tim Berners-Lee
Japan coastline, March 2010 Tsunami,
UNOSAT Imagery

29. Giuseppe Lo Presti
Enjoy your visit! Questions?
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Further information
CERN TV: youtube.com/cern
Jobs & stages: cern.ch/jobs
This slide show: cern.ch/go/tZn9
The CERN Control Centre on March 30th, 2010,
first LHC Physics day with colliding beams at 3.5 TeV
Visit to CERN