Rector supports blog

Last Friday Imperial's rector Sir Richard Sykes visited CERN - in particular the two experiments with IC involvement CMS and LHCb.

The visit was supervised by CERN's VIP service, a guarantee that nothing can go wrong: 9:00 pick up at the hotel, 9:25 arrive at LHCb, visit. 9:45 go to CMS, photographer is waiting... and so on until the signature of the guest book at 14:15 (involving another photographer). A quite impressive organization that has not much in common with the usual "private" visits of LHCb or CMS.

So early in the morning Jim and the rector met us (Tatsuya, our spokesman, Will and myself) at point 8 for a visit of the LHCb detector. Tatsuya showed every interesting detail and let us enter any usually forbidden door. A quite interesting tour, even for LHCb members!

Of course we had a long stop in front of RICH1 where I tried to explain how it works (remember Cherenkov radiation?) and why we need such a device and CMS don't. I also took the opportunity to ask him if I could make a picture for the blog. That's when he said it was a great idea. One needs to be modern...

After a brief visit of the LHC tunnel we left Tatsuya and Will and continued to point 5 for a CMS visit. Since I hadn't seen CMS for quite some time (especially not since there's something in the cavern) I joined the CMS tour - which was really impressive. Not only because of CMS, but mostly because Jim knows every detail of it and seems to remember an anecdote about every piece of equipment. He also seems to remember each price tag...

The morning was quite challenging - the rector - a biologist - had many interesting questions and seemed very interested about the goals of the research and the technical challenges. I am also not used to being followed by a professional photographer all the time!

We then went to CERN for a lunch with Lyn Evans - head of the LHC project - and Geoff (who would later show the CMS tracker). Of course I tried to get a few insider information about when the LHC will start, but the official statement remains: there will be an announcement by the end of the month. (But feel free to drop by my office I you want to hear some unofficial statements).