I did a similar post about summer (check it out here). This time I want to show autumn marvels of the area we live in now. Although this fall is a special one for us and we weren’t able to visit as many places as we would like to, still even with those few we did, we came up with some nice autumn photo shots.
Divonne-les-bains
Jura mountains
Concourge – pumpkin festival in Vernier (those evil pumpkins were carved by children) – a bit scary, huh?
Weather pampers us this fall, so we try to get as much of sun rays as possible before winter comes. Today we were passing by Swiss vineyards and we just couldn’t help and stopped for a brief walk along.
Grapes’ harvests are already finished but every now and then we could find a bunch on the grapevines.
Last weekend CERN organised open-days. Over 70 000 people visited CERN facilities and over 20 000 of them went underground in one of six underground facilities. During this days 2 300 CERN volunteers cared about people’s safety and good time. I was one of them. I was an underground guide in LHC Point 6 which is responsible for LHC beam dumping system.
On Monday CERN opened these six underground facilities for members of personnel so I had occasion to see LHCb experiment and once again LHC Point 6 – this time with a camera.
Before LHC was created, CERN worked with LEP (Large Electron Positron) Collider. At those times LHCb cavern was the place of DELPHI experiment. Because disassembling and removing of DELPHI detector would be very time consuming and very expensive, it was decided to keep part of the detector underground and move LHCb a bit aside. Thanks to that I was able to see not one but two detectors.
Then we moved to LHC Point 6 where I was a guide during the weekend. LHC beam dumping system was created because you can’t leave circulated protons inside LHC after finishing a day of work. Protons have energy of moving train and if they hit any part of LHC they will destroy it. It is also not so easy to redirect them to some safe place because they travel with almost speed of light. So beam duping system contains three types of magnets that do this job.
First:
Kickers that extract very fast beam from LHC pipes and redirect it a bit up.
Second:
MSD that redirect beam a bit left.
Third:
MKB that spread beam from 1×1 mm (when it enters the magnet) to 30×30 cm (when beam hits block of 8 meters of graphite). Beam must be spread because even 8 meters of graphite can’t handle a moving train that hits 1×1 mm spot.
At the both end of LHC Point 6 you can see LHC circle curvature
I had lots of fun while guiding people through undergrounds of Point 6 and now I saw almost all of CERN underground facilities. Next stop: ALICE and LHC Point 4.
First day of September might foreshadow autumn, not this year though… With a truly summer-like weather, we went for a 'Moulin de vert’ walk by the Swiss side of the border, along the river.
We set off from the dame (pretty cool, I’ve never seen a dame from this close) and went down the turquoise river on our right and ponds on our left. We passed by many families doing barbecue, crossed a field, had a short climb up the cliff and sat down on a bench by a view point. Then, we went down to a small Swiss village – Cartigny (they are all so nice and neat!) and then back to the car through the fields and barbecue site. Très agréable!
Today we went to a European Dog Show that was advertised to have witnessed over 3500 dogs. O boy, I was excited to see and pet all of them. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by the venue. First of all, at the time we were there the contests going on featured only… small strange dogs. I was hoping more for wolf-like creatures 🙂 Second of all, it was not easy to pet the dogs… I only sneaked a couple of strolls (felt like a criminal). Nevertheless, it was an interesting experience to see such venue and get the gist how it looks like.
We decided not to wait for the perfect air clarity in order to go to a téléphérique du Salève, which is a cable car that goes on the top of Salève mountain, known as the balcony of Geneva. Indeed, one can see the whole city from the station, as well as a good deal of Lac Leman shore.
A cable car ride is fun of its own, it goes very quickly and steeply. When we reached the top we headed staright to a view point on Mont Blanc, which was situated 15 minutes away walking from the main station. The mountain was a bit covered by the clouds, we tried to wait for the wind to blow them away, but it didn’t look like that, so we came back to the station site to watch para-gliders and Geneva.
Today we celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. We set out to Geneva, to a ceremonial dinner in a restaurant and a walk downtown. We made a short recollection what has happened in the past five years and I have to say, quite a bit. We both hope that the next five years will be even more fruitful.
The day was exceptionally hot, even after the sunset, so our walk was rather lazy. We stopped by an embankment quite often to admire the view on the city and enjoyed the splash of the water under the fountain. Lovely evening.
I have already seen CMS detector with Ania and it was pretty awesome. Today I had a chance to see ATLAS experiment, which in principle does the same what CMS but is way bigger (CMS is a compact detector). It was quite nice, the size of the machine was spectacular.
Today we went for an absolutely awesome visit of CMS detector of Large Hadron Collider. But before I start with the description and pictures, a short YouTube video in order for you to understand the title of this post.
I love this video, it’s funny and it conveys surprisingly a lot of science knowledge going on in LHC.
So back to our visit – CERN is a place where the scientists from all over the world look for the principle of our world. But that’s not the only thing in CERN’s strategy. They also try and spread the knowledge about physics, educate people etc. That is why they organize free trips, exhibitions, lectures etc. I really appreciate that and we could benefit from that not for the first time.
We enrolled for a visit to CMS – one of four detectors in LHC. When I was at CERN 3 years earlier it was impossible to visit the cavern because the beam was in and detectors were closed for public. This time, with long shutdown and maintenance phase, going to a detector was first thing we thought of.
Our visit started with SM18, a place where the magnets and other elements for LHC are assembled.
For me it was a very interesting tour because the guide explained everything we saw and added some interesting stories on top. i was aware of some facts, but more or less half was new to me so I was pretty content to have that tour.
Then we went on a shuttle and drove to Cessy, a small French village where CMS detector was build only 15 years ago. It really makes me breathless to think that all of that was constructed only within 15 years. They started with a flat ground, dug a shaft of 100 m. underground, build the whole infrastructure around and constructed the detector which, for me, is like a masterpiece of science. Seriously, when I saw this I was simply awestruck. It’s so enormous and complicated and makes you respect collaborative work because such things can only happen when people unite and act together in one cause.
How cool is that?
It takes a lot of champagne to celebrate all the days of success of LHC/CMS.
And at the end check out our short movie from the visit to the cavern:
