Anders Bennehag

Background: CERN is an organisation that conducts research in the field of physics. They were the inventors of Internet and they hold several Nobel prizes. Their primary interests lies in the particle physics and as such they have several large particle accelerators where they let protons and lead cores crash into each other. For more information, head over to the wikipedia article.

CERN is currently building/finishing the Large Hadron Collider or LHC which basically is a 27km long tunnel where particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light and then crash into each other. LHC has yet to be tested, it has been heavily delayed but hopefully it will be taken into action very soon. The goal with LHC is to find the Higgs boson which is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

Togethere with a few class mates we went to CERN in the beginning of June. It was a rather long and not very comfortable trip, but as we went down 100m below ground it all became worth it .

[singlepic id="50" w="100" h="100" mode="" float="" ]We actually went down to see one of the four very large detectors. The largest is called ATLAS which was being assembled during our visit. The one we saw was called CMS, weighing over 12 500 tons it had to be put in place with a very large lifting crane (seen on the left).

[singlepic id="34" w="100" h="100" mode="" float="" ] These detectors keep track of all the “shards” that are created in the collisions between particles. The data created in these collisions is astronomical and has led to the development of the GRID, which employs the idea to distribute computational power. CERN is connected to several large computer centers around Europe. Some simple filtering is first applied at CERN and then the data is shuffled into the connected computer centers which calculate trajectories, velocities, forces etc. for the detected particles.

If anyone is interested, they accept summer students. As a summer student you actually take part in the research by writing a report on a subject of their choice while getting payed. But it requires pretty high grades since the positions are very sought after. Another possibility is to do your Masters thesis for one of the many talented teams down there.