Lines, lines

I remembered today to take the picture of theborder line between Switzerland and France....and here it is.

Woo-hoo! There are other lines around, too, but written into the floor...

The accelerator is 100 m (longer than a football field) under ground. I'll leave to your imagination the engineering feat of putting thousands of long magnets and very technical detector equipment underground in a 27 km (17 mile) circle, and line it up with less than a hairs-width precision. It isn't visible above ground like the moat at Fermilab. For an anniversary celebration, they put lines in the floor for a simulation of the layout, but they are not directly over the beams.

In case it's not clear for anyone, I'll explain some of the terms/acronyms. CERN is the European research organization by which this place is referred to as. LHC is the large ring (the 17 mile one) where protons are accelerated in opposite directions at very near the speed of light and smashed together. LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider. A hadron is a component of protons and neutrons, so since protons are collided to find their components, it got its name. There are 4 main detectors, or places where the smashing takes place; ATLAS, LHCb, CMS, and ALICE. There are smaller booster accelerators that get the protons up to speed before being "injected" into the LHC, the last one is the SPS or super proton synchrotron. There are many more acronyms flying about, but that's enough for now. I asked if there as a Director of Acronyms here.

This morning, we started with the detector physics and cosmology lectures again. Lunch was delicious....smoked Scandanavian salmon. Yesterday was pizza and creme brulee, the day before was veal, and supper tonight was sauteed shrimp, but that's another story. Anyway, we met with our working group shortly after lunch, and then tours of the proton source,

the linear accelerator (LINAC),

and LEIR (low energy ion ring).

After those tours, we went to the ATLAS control room.

Our working group met again, and the rest of tonight is homework for working group meeting tomorrow. That, and laundry....

A couple of last pictures....this is a statue outside the hostel area. It is of the Hindu deity Shiva, however I picked a bad day to photograph it because of the haze in the air. I'll try again later. It was a gift from India, as the plaque says.