We are scientists working at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the World Wide Web! Ask Us (Almost) Anything!

Does the name Okabe Rintarou ring a bell?

SteinsGate, if I am not wrong. But we don't do time machines yet. Ask me again yesterday, if this has changed in five years.

(sl)

How much political input/interference is there in your work? Given that so many nations contribute funding, does conflict ever arise in regards to what you can do?

There is fortunately no political input/interference in our work, and this is regardless of our origine or anything. What we do is just pure science! (nm)

How much hooking up goes on between the scientists at CERN? Please rate on a scale of "Frostier than Elsa's Ice Palace" to "Sexy Cheerleader Camp group cabin"

What I can tell is that there is an intense social life at CERN which I would call inbred: the community at CERN is somewhat special ... Long hours spent at the lab, sometime a geeky attitude, does not favor contacts outside CERN ... end result: I know a lot of people who have found their companion within the community. (TC)

What does it sound like when you turn it on? (Seriously)

when we close the LHC after access, the access console beeps. when we send out timing events to synchronise the equipment, we have an announcer that speaks out a line, that recalls what happened.

for the rest, the control room is far from the equipment, so we don't really hear it... but colleagues told me that at the ISR (another accelerator at CERN), they could hear the beam being dumped with a low pitch boom :) (gp)

Would it be technically or bureaucratically difficult to install microphones to record it next year?

we have had microphones installed, to listen to the sound of an asynchronous dump on the collimators :) (gp)

If you're referring to the 'sound' a collision makes, then it's non-existent, as it all takes place inside the beam-pipe, which is held in a vacuum.

However, as a Ph.D student there (in ATLAS), I can say that the experiment's control room (above ground, away from all that radiation) has some great 'sound effects' for the various stages of the experiment (ramping up the energy,start of collisions, dumping the beam when it's depleted).

Please explain what you mean by "dumping the beam when it's depleted". This sounds like something that is required after a jump through hyperspace, and sounds very interesting.

the beam gets dumped whenever it is not interesting for physics anymore (and the operators decide to extract it), or whenever anything on the accelerator side goes wrong (and Machine Protection takes care of extracting it automatically).

by means of a special set of magnets, with very fast rise times, the beam gets extracted from the main ring to a special place, the beam dump itself, where it hits a huge block of graphite and scatters its energy.

(gp)

What discovery/research should be getting more publicity than it is?

We are doing a lot of research which does not get onto the blogs/newspapers: we have published more than 100 scientific papers on major peer reviewed journals.

Such papers are all about measuring the way Nature works at fundamental level. Today this kind of fundamental research can only be carried out in laboratories like CERN and it is our role to exploit such tools to provide mankind with these measurement which could be the basis of the future 'revolution' in understanding the inner workings of Nature. (TC)

I'm just thinking out loud now: Might this complicate falsifying a scientific statement? If equipment for measurement costs so much (as CERN), how can other scientists replicate your results and perhaps falsify your conclusions?

Just curious - have you given that thought?

There are two huge collaborations at CERN (CMS and ATLAS) as well as a number of much smaller collaborations. Each collaboration works independently of each other and so their results can validate each others'.

(Not OP, btw, but...)

Good answer ! (TC)

Do you guys do anything classified?

CERN is an academic environment and we take lots of efforts to publish results, technical designs, etc. We do not do any military research. Therefore, there is few stuff being "classified". Sometimes, there is a period when we keep information internal until we are sure the results are correct. Thus, basically, you find only the "usual" classified stuff at CERN: payslips, medical records of our employees, passwords, financial information.

(sl)

That and your time machine research.

Oh. Yes. But that has been handed over to SERN.

(sl)

What is the most mind-boggling thing you have learned or experienced in your time working there?

Diversity of cultures and being able to work with some of the most brilliant minds has been ( and still is after having been at CERN for 28 years) one of the things I consider a unique feature of CERN. (tc)

What is each of your's favorite work of fiction involving CERN?

I personally love the big bang theory. I can offer a free tour of the LHC control room for authors and actors if they come over to Geneva. (gp)

Bruno Arpaia's "Energia del Vuoto' : I have read the original italian book..do not know if it has ever been translated. (TC)

Do you have any advice for an undergraduate Physics student aspiring to one day work with you at CERN?

Sure! Join CERN as a summer student (too late for this year, I fear) but what about 2015? You'll get hands-on at CERN: weeks of lectures in the morning by professionals, hands-on projects within different CERN groups on your favorite subject, and lots of networking and socializing in the evenings. Meet your peers from all over the world. Sign up here.

(sl)

I'm a physics undergraduate and I'll be making the move to Geneva to work at CERN for a year as a technical student in 2 weeks! I'm extremely excited.

How's the weather over there?

Great! That'll be definitely fun! Wheather is sunny 30degC. Hope that stays!

(sl)

Im educated in this field nor smart enough to really understand but i'd love to spend a summer there as a 40 year old summer student.

Age does not really count. I have just seen a 40yrs old applicant to our Technical Student programme. But you would need to be enlisted with an university...

(sl)

What common misconceptions do people have about your work i.e. black hole makers?

What range of qualification and experience do you and your colleagues have?

Common misconceptions are the widely advertised black-hole maker thing, but also the fear of us developing new dangerous 'stuff' (the fact that CERN is doing sub- nuclear research adds to the confusion). Another common misconception on the positive side is to think that we might develop the solution to the energy problems of the world. (TC)

How close are you to unifying gravity and quantum mechanics?

Not very close yet... This is a big area of research, many people are working on it, there have been some progress already but still a lot of work is needed. (nm)

What is the coolest thing you've ever had the chance to do in your work at CERN (besides smashing particles together, of course)?

I love LEGO. When Google came around and was taking footings of the CERN Computer Centre for their Google Streetview, I had a chance to drop a few LEGO minifigs beforehand. Later we made a treasure hunt of it... Was quite fun. If you want to try yourself, go here. If you want to cheat, solutions are here.

(sl)

How often are you guys able to predict what discoveries you will make? For example, when you found the Higgs Boson there had already been predictions that it would be found at some point in time, as our technology improved. Are there any other examples of less well known, expected, breakthroughs and does the accuracy of these predictions vary from the different areas of research?

It is a good question: the way we work is by theorist assembling the information that we , experimentalists, make into models. Such models besides explaining what we have already observed make also predictions which we try to verify ( the HIggs boson is a notable example). In terms of 'how often' this is the most common situation we are dealing in our daily research life.

There are many other questions ( like why there is an obvious asymmetry between matter and antimatter) where the model builders and the experimentalist are trying to bootstrap each other with continous progress in understanding.

And there have been times where experimentalists have surprised the theorists by discovering new particles which nobody had foreseen ( example the tau lepton) (TC)

i am a computer science graduate and will complete my masters next year. besides software engineering my other field of interest is physics. what kind of projects do i embrace so i can one day work at CERN with you?

Computer science is everywhere at CERN! The massive amounts of data collected by the physics experiment must be filtered, transferred and stored. "Big Data Analytics" is a good start here. High bandwidth networking another. Mass storage (>100PB/year) a third.

Within the CERN openlab we work with third parties on such research --- so if you want to fiddel with hardware come here.

If you love software design, there are lots of opportunities, too: developping applications to run the LHC, to serve our physicist community, etc.

In brief: Make your field of interest a hobby and sign up as a student with CERN! A good master is an excellent start, but hands-on experience you just can get on the job.

(sl)

I've come to CERN for my master thesis in telecom engineering, as a technical student, I worked on optical links for CMS. I did also my PhD at CERN, in digital microelectronics. now I am hired as an applied physicist and work in the LHC control room. There is a very wide range of options here!

Definitely look at the student programs! (gp)

Comic Sans. Why Comic Sans?

Because "Arial" sucks, doesn't it?

(sl)

How much does your electric bill average each month?

a figure I heard is that we use ~180MW on a good day… most of it taken by the accelerator complex. (gp)

How strong is the firewall in CERN computer system?Does hacker often try to pringe into CERN sytem?

Q: What is the purpose of a firwall? A: To let traffic through. If we don't need to let traffic through, we would cut the cable...

We use a standard firewall configuration to control traffic. As we serve a world-wide community, there are hundreds of computing services open to the Internet: web servers, SSH gateways, Windows Terminal Servers, conference room booking systems, document stores, web mail servers, etc...

Like any other organization worldwide, these are permanently probed for weaknesses. We monitor this activiely and, so far, successful attacks (detected by us ;-) have been rare.

(sl)

What are you most excited to see happen in the near future concerning your respective fields of research?

I can't wait to see the beam at high energy, early next year. on the accelerator side, we have a few things that might cause issues that we'll have to work on: electron clouds in the beam pipe, Unidentified Falling Objects, beam instabilities, … it'll be fun! (gp)

Finding new particles that could confirm the predictions of the theories I am working on! That will allow us to finally know what is the correct direction to go beyond the Standard Model of particle physics! (nm)

How do you all decide what projects to study and work on? Are you pretty much given free reign? Is it based on budgetary constraints or what could have profitable applications? Is there someone in charge who gets to say "Hey, we should do more research into black holes" or whatever?

As theorists, we are free to work on the projects we wish, depending on what we think more interesting or needed. Experimentalists however have also predecided projects to work on depending on the program and preiorities of the collaborations. We also have sometimes common projects between theorists and experimentalists. (nm)

What do you hope to see happen within physics within your lifetimes? Is there a particular piece of the puzzle that you want solved for closure?

There are many puzzles! One of the most intriguing ones though is the nature of dark matter. (nm)

Is there a secret duplicate LHC, like they did for the machine in the movie Contact, in case some crazy-ass incident occurs?

No! (nm)

What is it like to work at CERN? Schedules, workloads, commutes, social lives, etc?

I love working here, the research and the international environment in particular. my schedule is messy when we have beam, as I take shifts in the control room. the rest of the time, it's normal working hours - which sometimes get extended in case of deadlines that come up.

I live, as many others, close by, so commuting is short (10 minutes). this June many of us are doing bike2work - so I biked in today, the weather is beautiful. my personal interests fit in well also. skiing is close by in between Swiss and French Alps, and the Geneva yoga festival is great too.

(gp)

So, now you have the higgs. what's next?

We have to measure all the Higgs properties as precisely as we can! We also have new models to go beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and there are active searches ongoing at CERN to look for new particles. (nm)

What impact will funding have on future research?

Today's fundamental research is based on tools which require investment (that has always been the case , but in the past this funding was at the level of individual research institutes or of national initiative). Today not even 'continental' investment can cope with the needs of fundamental research. So if we want to progress further there will be need of substantial investment. For example in the last 12 months it has been decided to exploit fully the potential of the LHC accelerator :in order to exploit the potential of the improved accelerator we will need improved detectors. These do not come for free ...

So yes, funding will be essential for fully exploiting what the LHC accelerator can tell us ( and that might be a lot ... as there a lot of unaswered questions like what is dark matter, why is our universe made of matter and so on ) (TC)

Whats your favorite part out using scientific linux, or worst part? Btw, pretty cool that cern has adopted linux for research!

I take the chance to point to this picture… I'm in it and the captions are not 100% true. (gp)

How close are we towards a GUT? Is their some technical aspect holding us back or is it something else?

No, I would say we have to verify the GUT model predictions experimentally at the LHC and there are ongoing searches... (nm)

Whats the process of decieding which particles you smash together? do you just take random shit and throw it together or are there scientific reasonings for it?

concerning the LHC, it was designed to do proton-proton, and lead-lead. then we also did proton-lead, and lead-proton, which is less obvious that what it sounds like.

I guess what I want to say is that it depends on the physics goals.

(gp)

What are Les Horribles Cernettes up to? :)

I missed out on their last show 'cause I was on shift at the LHC! (gp)