Physics Hacker

After the successfull restart of the LHC, the first collisions with two 3.5 TeV beams colliding at 7 TeV will take place on march 30th. From 8:30 till 18:00 (UTC+01) there will be a live webcast at

http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/

The first collisions will probably take place between 9:00 and 11:00. The tentative schedule can be found here.

Update: An interesting page to watch the beam is the LHC Operations beam status page.

Dr. Stefano Redaelli from CERN will hold two lectures on an overview of what happens when the LHC is in running mode. The lectures should be suitable for everyone with a bachelor or Vordiplom in physics or electrical engineering.They will take place in the CERN main auditorium at

• April 7, 10am-11am
• April 9, 10am-11am

More information can be found in the official announcement. If you happen to not be at CERN during that time, there will be also a webcast! As additional information on the webcast becomes available, I will post it here!

• The video of the first part of the lecture can be found here (choose “download movie->high res” to see all details of the slides).
• The video of the second part of the lecture can be found here (choose “download movie->high res” to see all details of the slides).
• The slides can be found here.

Yesterday we played board games in the CERN restaurant. Talking about an official event on friday one of the guys said, that he probably won’t be invited to official events for some times, because of a recent dispute with the CERN management. Surely we wanted to know what he did and he told us, that in his blog he pointed to a talk given by CERN Director-General Robert Aymar where one of the topics was the status of the LHC. The interesting thing about the talk was, that it contains pictures from the LHC incident on September 19. In his blog he pointed to the slides of the talk which were publicly accesible, but hidden deep inside the CERN Web.

Shortly after he posted the link to the slides, the access to the slides was restricted. So he contacted the CERN Press Office, why this was done. The official reply from the CERN Press Office was, that they wanted to inform the CERN community first, before publishing the pictures to the general public.

The incident has happend quite a while ago and it’s good to finally see some pictures of it, even if many members of CERN criticize the lack of openness regarding this topic.

• Original blog posting
• official CERN press release on the restart of the LHC in 2009 including the above mentioned pictures

Thats currently my favourit LHC status web page:

http://ab-dep-op.web.cern.ch/ab-dep-op/vistar.php?usr=LHC

Especially last Thursday it was very usfull, since all webcast pages have been unavailably.

So after the colleauges at SLAC already had their infamous rap video:

LHC now has its own:

Here seems to be the origin of this video.