pt.5

It seems I finally asked the right person to take me to Point Five. Yesterday a bunch of us summer students (me, Liz, Kenny, Dane, Robin, Josh) piled into cars here at the Prevessin test-beam and were off for a great tour of the Point Five construction area.

The largest component of the CERN laboratory is a circular tunnel, 27 kilometers in circumference and nearly 100 meters underground. In the coming years this tunnel will be filled with superconducting magnets and acceleration cavities, and together it will form the Large Hadron Collider (the collider, not the hadrons, is large). Inside this tunnel, protons will be accelerated in both directions to very high energies. At regularly spaced intervals along the ring there are huge caverns, into which the experiments will be installed, and at several of these points the two proton beams are made to intersect, resulting in collisions. The primary experiments at this time are ATLAS and CMS. Our project is CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid (once again, the solenoid, not the muons, is compact — for loose definitions of "compact"). The CMS measures what comes out of these proton-proton collisions.

CMS is located at Point Five, which is located directly opposite (180 degrees from) the main CERN Meyrin campus, where I live and where most people work. Unlike ATLAS, CMS is being built above ground and will be lowered in about a dozen pieces into the experimental cavern. The thing is rather large:

Kenny has posted the rest of our pictures.