What is CERN?

I spent six months (June - December 2000) at CERN working on my undergraduate thesis for KTH. CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a large physics center close to Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France. There are several ongoing achtivities at CERN. A big project is the construction of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which will run in a 26 km circular tunnel and will replace the previous accelerator LEP. Several experiments are being built for LHC.

LHC

LHC will carry two counter rotating beams of protons. The protons in each beam will be travelling in bunches separated by 25 ns. At four collision points the two beams are brought together to produce collisions at a bunch crossing frequency of 40 MHz. ATLAS is an experiment which will be placed at one of these crossing points.

ATLAS

The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) experiment is one of three experiments being built for studying proton-proton collisions at the LHC. The detector is designed for studies of a wide range of physics including searches for Higgs bosons, supersymmetric particles, new gauge bosons, leptoquarks, detailed measurements of CP-violation, of the third quark family and measurements on rare B-hadron decays. The ATLAS detector will consist of three basic units that capture information from particles emerging from the collisions. These three units are the inner detector, the calorimeter and the muon spectrometer.

The inner detector will rest inside the magnetic field of a 2 T solenoid. The purpose of the inner detector is to provide high-precision space point for tracing the tracks of charged particles emerging from the high energy collisions. The detector will consist of three parts gathering data at different distances from the collision point. The SCT is one of these units. The SCT will consist of 4 barrels and a total of 17 endcap disks covered with silicon strip detectors.

The SCT was what I worked with for half a year. I was involved in the system test work of this detector. Here is the final report (pdf). My work was financed by TTA technotransfer AB.

Geneva

Geneva is a beautiful city at Rhones outlet of Lake Geneva. The city has 172000 inhabitants and is the center of the french speaking part of Switzerland.

Here is a picture of the Jet D'Eau.

Pictures

I lived at the dorm Cite Universitaire in the south part of Geneva. Here are my floor mates Ali and Hicham.

Here are my brasilian friends Ronney and Edinho.

Fox and Soe on our trip to Lugano.

Last Updated 2002-02-22 Bjorn Skubic