LHC@home

Last week my wife and I were on holidays in Geneva and as she is the best (and only) wife I have she agreed to apply for a guided tour at CERN.
It was very challenging to get a request code as there are only a few places on each tour and they are often booked out very quickly.
Finally I was fast enough to snatch 2 places via the CERN website.

After a short introduction meeting we started our tour in the ATLAS building where we watched a 3D movie about the LHC and the ATLAS detector.
We could also look into the ATLAS control room where the engineers were waiting for a stable beam to start their experiments.
There is a red emergency switch in the visitors room outside the control room but nobody, including myself, is encouraged enough to hit it despite the fact that the switch is obviously not connected.
:-)

Another station on our tour was the SC building (SC = Synchro Cyclotron) with it's 5 m thick walls that work as a shield against the radiation produced by the meanwhile retired accelerator inside the building. The CERN people enhanced the otherwise dark and silent room with an impressive light show that nearly brings the old machine back to life.

Independend from the tour CERN visitors can enter two exhibitions free of charge and whithout registration, the Globe and the Microcosm.
Unfortunately lhc@home is not mentioned anywhere in the exhibitions.

Our tour guide, many thanks for the good explanations, introduced himself as "a person who workes for the CMS experiment". Far later I noticed that he is one of the most honorable physicists worldwide who has already been a candidate for the nobel price. Sad to say that the next nobel price may already be reserved for the people who discovered evidence of gravitational waves.

Many special thanks also to a CERN honorary staff member, Eric Mcintosh, who not only gave us a lot of useful advice in advance of our visit. He also joined our guided tour and we had a coffee afterwards while we talked about his home Scotland and how it is to live in Geneva for so many years than he did. Thank you Eric. It was a great honour to meet you.

I, too, recommend the tour, having taken it 4 years ago. It's good that the guide is one of the scientists that we are, in some small way, helping although perhaps there should be some mention and promotion of LHCathome and Boinc which might encourage others on the tour to join if they have not already done so, to be part of the science. The 3D virtual tour was good although it is still hard to imagine the sheer scale of the detector without actually having a peek into the cavern itself.

I, too, recommend the tour, having taken it 4 years ago. It's good that the guide is one of the scientists that we are, in some small way, helping although perhaps there should be some mention and promotion of LHCathome and Boinc which might encourage others on the tour to join if they have not already done so, to be part of the science. The 3D virtual tour was good although it is still hard to imagine the sheer scale of the detector without actually having a peek into the cavern itself.

You will be happy to learn that some information about LHC@home is now being prepared for the visits, including a new LHC@home T-shirt for sale in the Reception shop. I agree that this is long overdue!

Ben

---