July 21

It was a very full day, with a great surprise. Normally, we cannot get down into the tunnels that are 100 meters below the ground and contain the beam pipes. However, the LHC is on a technical shutdown today, and they reclassified the CMS detector so that we could go down and take a look. Some funny stories came out of the shut down, like we heard that the CMS detector kept working even when the beam was shut off because they've never had a protocol for a planned shut down. Anyway, it was incredibly good luck that this happened so that we could have the opportunity to go underground. We had to go through a double security door with an eye scanner to get in, just like in Angels and Demons (except that our eyes were still in our heads).



We went down an elevator, and it opened into the CMS (compact muon solonoid) cavern. This picture is of the beam pipe just before it enters the detector.



The detector is right behind me. There are endcaps on it, so the actual detector is much more exciting than what I could take a photo of, but it was very exciting just to be able to see it.




We then went to the control room of CMS. The man on the right is Frank Hartman, the person pretty much in charge of CMS. Of the four detectors, CMS and ATLAS are the two that are looking for the Higgs boson. They are similar in how they work, but they have some big differences which might make one more likely to find it first.




After we toured CMS, we went to LHCb. Here they use the beauty (bottom) quark to try to find out what happened to anti-matter very soon after the big bang. Back through the eye scanner and double door system....




Down in the LHCb cavern, the old Delphi detector is still housed. It was used before the LHC was built in the tunnels, back when it was LEP (large electron positron experiment). The endcaps are removed from Delphi so that we can see the detector itself.




So, there are four main detectors at the LHC: CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, and ALICE, and I have been to the control room of each of those, and into the cavern of CMS and LHCb.
We aren't done yet though! Then we went to CAST (CERN Axion Solar Telescope). They are using xrays from the sun to see if they can find any information on dark matter. I thought the quote about how Axions were named was good.

After returning to the main campus, I tried to go eat lunch with the guys from Perimeter Institute, but we got to restaurant 2 just as it was closing. They headed to the other restaurant and then on their way home, and I grabbed a Snickers and Coke and went to the training center to work on my project. At 5, I left there to come to my room to change shoes, and then it was a picnic in the Jura Mountains.

Transportation around CERN is mainly by foot, but if we need to go somewhere else on the accelerator ring, we have cars rented from CERN. Five of us shared a Fiat Panda yesterday(google it...we sort of looked like a clown car). When we go somewhere off the CERN site, then we carpool with whatever cars we can find. One of the cars we ride in is the Porsche, and it requires a short person to be able to fit into it. It's my sacrifice for the group....to always be the one that "has" to ride in the Porsche. Tonight it was up the Col de la Faucille to the bottom of a ski lift. We then had to walk a road that rose 200 m (650 ft) vertically from that point.

We were at the top of Petit Mont Rond, elevation 1533 m (5,033 ft). As we climbed, it started sprinkling and the wind picked up.

We had a makeshift picnic of fresh fruit, cheese, french breads, some meats, wine, and beer.

Soon after we started eating, it really started raining, so we stood under the ski-lift until it let up some. Then we gathered up our food and carried it all back down the mountainside. It would have been a beautiful spot if the weather had been more cooperative.

Sometimes the good thing about rain is that it cools things down a bit. It was up in the mid 90's yesterday and today, and it looks to be rainy and in the 70's tomorrow. We have working groups all day tomorrow, and since I am almost done with my project, I am going to try to sleep in a little bit. Hopefully tomorrow night a few of us will go out for meat on a mace.