The pit

So last thursday and friday, I was at CERN, the European centre for particle physics in Geneva. The snowy Jura mountains gave a beautiful background to the "globe of innovation" which was built last year to celebrate the CERN's 50 year existence.
On the picture you can see behind the globe some buildings. Below these building the ATLAS experiment is building assembled. Two large shafts give access to the cavern to bring down all the different detector components that have been built all over the world. The NIKHEF SCT endcap (my project, my "baby") will go down march/april next year!
Down in the pit you can already see the first parts of the ATLAS detector; the huge coils that form the magnet and in the middle you can see the barrel part of the calorimeter. The calorimeter will measure the energy of the particles created after the high energy collision the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider.
The christmas spirit had even reached the ATLAS pit as was demonstrated by a little tree dangling on top of the construction...

Comments

[Geplaatst door: Aaron F.]

Wow! I can never get used to how *massive* that stuff is...

p.s. What's inside the globe?