Chair of the CERN Council Professor Michel Spiro

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CERN. Jacques Fichet CERN s collision course 4th July 2012 marks the date in particle physics history when CERN announced its discovery, to 5-sigma level of certainty, of the elusive Higgs boson

1 CERN. Jacques Fichet CERN s collision course 4th July 2012 marks the date in particle physics history when CERN announced its discovery, to 5-sigma level of certainty, of the elusive Higgs boson particle. Subject to much scrutiny and a source of great inspiration in science fact and fiction, this has been the most significant finding made by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since its inception. Here, Editor Lauren Smith speaks to three figures at the heart of CERN who have witnessed the developments of this seminal year as steps were taken to develop our understanding of the universe, from the miniscule to the massive Chair of the CERN Council Professor Michel Spiro has made a wide range of crucial contributions to the field of particle physics. He has held his current position for three consecutive terms, and offers his perspective on the impact that the Higgs boson discovery will have on the organisation. CERN Council Chair Professor Michel Spiro The search for the Higgs particle, and more generally for the Brout Englert Higgs electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, has been the basis of the CERN organisational strategy for the past 30 years, starting with the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) Collider and then the LHC, Spiro begins. The discovery of a Higgslike particle is both an accomplishment of the past strategy and a starting point for the next 20 year one. 1 Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17

2 The discovery generated an unprecedented level of interest around physics, which may influence the direction of future science funding. The coverage of the 4th July announcement in the media and the impact of the discovery were beyond even our expectations, he says. This shows that the public and governments are more sensitive to the advancement of basic science and understanding than generally admitted. Developments in understanding about what we are made of and where we come from are fascinating. A major step such as the discovery of a Higgs-like particle can only help to sustain this type of effort and, more generally, maintain basic science funding. CERN receives a considerable level of finance from across Europe and beyond, and although much of the focus is on basic science and groundbreaking discoveries, these and commercial technologies must be capitalised on to maximise the benefits to society and the economy. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is due to produce a study by the end of the year on how CERN contributes to boosting growth in the world, along with the social and economic benefits it brings through its openly collaborative global model of innovation. CERN has developed the concept of open innovation in a systematic and concrete way: the web, which was born at CERN, is emblematic of this, declares Spiro. CERN is also active in open source software and hardware, promoting collaborative innovation, developing grid computing (from which cloud computing derives), and now open access publishing. The latter model is a new paradigm, and in the case of particle physics, CERN will play a central role in selecting the editors to whom collaborations can submit their papers to be refereed and published with free access to all. With regards to long-term priorities, Spiro feels that CERN must first focus on the optimal exploitation of the LHC. This means reaching the nominal 14 TeV energy soon (we are presently at 8 TeV), producing 100 times more Higgs-like particles than we have so far, and hopefully finding signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Meanwhile, we will continue to develop strong R&D on high gradients cavities and high field magnets in order to be in a position to select what should be the future machine at CERN after the LHC, in the light of the results obtained at LHC and the R&D. As he comes to the end of his term at the CERN Council, Spiro recognises the significance of the period he has observed. I was very lucky during the past three years to witness the enlargement of CERN that made the organisation increasingly global, as well as the first discoveries at LHC, he concludes. Both were necessary conditions to ensure CERN and particle physics have a bright future that will benefit mankind. Inside the ATLAS detector at CERN: The discovery of a Higgs-like particle is both an accomplishment of the past strategy and a starting point for the next one CERN. Claudia Marcelloni Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17 2

It s not often that you change the rules as radically as this does. This year s discovery has opened up a whole host of fresh options in this field.

3 either rule it out or discover it. We were therefore able to lay down a timescale within which one of these outcomes should occur. That made it even more intense because we knew when we were in exactly the right region. It has been a real gift for me to be here. My timing has been great. It s not often that you change the rules as radically as this does. This year s discovery has opened up a whole host of fresh options in this field. It s completely transformed the way that I ve been thinking, Murray explains. For a decade, I ve been trying to work out the best way to set up a search that is the most sensitive possible way of looking for this unknown, or missing, particle. Now we ve suddenly had to change it around; we ve found something, but we don t really know that it s the Higgs Deputy Physics Coordinator Bill Murray Bill Murray, Deputy Physics Coordinator at CERN, has been involved with the organisation for over two decades. He started his PhD there 25 years ago, before going on to engage in research, typically working on CERN experiments, and then becoming actively involved in the search for the Higgs boson 15 years ago. Murray s experience illustrates just a fraction of the amount of time and effort people have given from their research careers towards this end, and why this year s discoveries have reverberated so powerfully through the physics and wider scientific communities. The news of the Higgs boson particle was a long time in coming, as Murray reveals: We expected to find the Higgs boson in the 20th Century. We had hoped to uncover it with the LEP accelerator at CERN that ran between 1990 and There were lots of hints that it might be around, which turned out to be wrong. I thought it was maybe a five year mission. It turns out that the boson was only just outside of the previous accelerator s reach. We were nearly right but we were definitely wrong! Murray has therefore been at the centre of one of the biggest physics discoveries of recent times, and his enthusiasm for the project has been maintained over several decades. You see the thing gradually developing beneath you, he declares. It s tremendously exciting. You re always waking up in the morning and thinking: Goodness! Today we re going to do this or look at that. You just don t know what s going to be around the next corner. That s what motivates me: the hunt for discovery. The Higgs was a unique case really because with the LHC machine and detectors we knew that we could 3 Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17

4 boson not yet, not for certain. The focus is currently on what needs to measured in order to confirm that it really is the particle that CERN have been looking for, as well as how to complete these tests in an unbiased way without searching out the answers they wish to find. The most significant point for Murray personally was 4th July, the day of the announcement. This is the date at which we produced what looked like unambiguous proof from our experiments and saw that CMS, our competitors, also had much the same at the same point, he explains. It s all very well watching proof developing within your experiment because you re always questioning it a little bit, but to suddenly see the evidence doubling in front of your eyes and realising that you couldn t be wrong now you always slightly question your own work, so it s nice to have it confirmed by somebody else. Despite significant leaps in our understanding, Murray believes that physics still has the power to surprise. The Higgs put us in a unique position, he states. We knew that there was something there. We have a lot of unknowns now: what dark matter is, what dark energy is, what gravity is we don t even understand gravity. And how do all these things fit together? We know that there has to be more out there but we don t know what it is. Those things, by definition, will be surprises. We should say even the Higgs is a surprise. When I started on this, there were several different theories of what mass might be and we proved most of those wrong. We were left with this other one, but that didn t mean that was what nature was using. The LHC machine in the tunnel: The collider has been provisionally commissioned to run until 2021, but CERN believe this should be extended further CERN. Maximilien Brice Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17 4

5 Science is brutally logical: we followed a mathematical chain of reasoning and derived something about the world. We are talking about some new pattern, forceparticle, hybrid-thing that is pushed onto you by a chain of logic. And then 45 years later, you go and find one. You discover that it s really true. It s surprising that the world works so well; that we can comprehend the universe that s out there. That, I think, really is a major leap. Murray also acknowledges that the biggest surprise would be if there were actually no more particles to be discovered because, historically, as the accelerators have become significantly more powerful, new particles have been found, creating the impression that there is always another layer to investigate. He also feels that the Higgs quest has significantly increased the prominence of physics in society. The cost of the LHC has forced people to think about physics a bit more and to discuss it, Murray comments. So there s been a lot of anticipation. The Higgs has been a wonderful thing to discuss in that connection, so while we ve been putting the accelerator together, we ve been talking about it and have built a story that has attracted attention, grabbed interest and had time to develop. It can be harder to garner this attention when discoveries take us by surprise, as it s more difficult to create publicity. In the wake of the Higgs boson discovery, there is some speculation about what s on the horizon at CERN or what could be the next big thing, but Murray is adamant that they should not be too keen to jump ahead. Let s look at this particle and see what it is first, he asserts. We have a theory that s good up to a certain energy scale and we ve checked it up to about 1000 GeV. We don t know for how long that theory will continue as a complete description of nature. At some point, we know that it can t be, because things like gravity have to become important eventually. We have CMS Higgs Search in 2011 and 2012 data: candidate ZZ event (8 TeV) with two electrons and two muons CERN. McCauley T Taylor a soft hint that somewhere nearby there should be more going on, but we don t yet know for certain what that is or where exactly to look. Murray also elucidates on some hopes for the remainder of the LHC run before the temporary shutdown and upgrade takes place. There are two things that the Higgs boson or this particle really should do, he details. Firstly, it should not be spinning. All of the other fundamental particles that we ve seen are spinning, but spin has to be around some direction. Mass doesn t have any direction; you re always the same mass regardless of the direction in which you re pushing. If Higgs has got something to do with making mass, then that s something that we can go and check. Can we prove it completely this year? No, but we can certainly get some hints. The other thing that we d like to investigate is whether this particle really is responsible for giving mass to other ones, he continues. If so, then it ought to interact with them in proportion to their mass. We ve seen it reasonably well decaying to three different sorts of particle. There are two more that we should be able to check this year and then, with data from five different particles, we can see if it interacts with them according to their mass or not. If it does, then at that point we ll stop saying: It might be Higgs but it might not. If it does turn out to match what we re looking for, then we ll be saying: This is the Higgs. Much discussion has already occurred regarding CERN s future. In September, a European strategy meeting was held in Krakow to discuss the next five year plan for the LHC. For the immediate future, the priority is to run the collider as much as possible, in order to obtain the maximum amount of data. We ve been provisionally approved by the European governments to run until 2021, and we feel strongly that s just not long enough. We would like another 10 years after that, Murray declares. We think that we can get a lot more out of this, with 10 times more data and much deeper searches if we get to run it for that length of time. The closest competitor to the LHC was the Tevatron at Fermilab in the United States, which ran for 20 years. The LHC was a large and expensive project, so Murray is understandably keen to get maximum value from it, which he believes can be best achieved through a longer utilisation. There are some definite things that we want to measure, mostly to do with the Higgs, which we know we can do on a longer timescale programme, he states. We also want to do a lot more exploratory searching at the same time. We really do expect something else to be there but it s just hard to put your finger on it. 5 Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17

Clore Fellow Ariane Koek Although CERN s primary focus is cutting-edge science, a lesser known development at the site has been the creation of the Collide@CERN arts programme established by Ariane

6 Clore Fellow Ariane Koek Although CERN s primary focus is cutting-edge science, a lesser known development at the site has been the creation of the Collide@CERN arts programme established by Ariane Koek, through her funding from the Clore Fellowship award for cultural leadership. With experience in science communication as a producer and director renowned for bringing scientific perspectives to cultural programmes, Koek has a strong desire to translate ideas from science into the public and private domains. For me, ideas are the drivers, Koek begins. They are the currency of society the inspiration for arts, science, innovation and technology; the nexus around which you can shape things to accelerate innovation in the 21st Century. As a laboratory, CERN is an absolutely extraordinary place and at the time that I came here, with the hunt for the Higgs boson going on, it was the perfect place for artists to engage with scientists but it is also is the perfect place for scientists to engage with artists. Having looked at arts/science residency programmes from around the world and then at what CERN had done in the past, Koek completed a feasibility study for the programme and presented her findings in November 2009, before it came into full swing. Koek has brought world-renowned artists into CERN through the residency element of the programme including choreographer Gilles Jobin and artist Julius von Bismarck. While she admits that the reactions of physicists have been mixed, on the whole Koek feels that they have been very positive. The great thing about particle physicists is that, because they are familiar with looking at the biggest questions of the universe down to the very small, they re very intrigued about everything and this makes them a natural partner for artists. With the artists residency scheme there are different ways to engage with the science community, Koek reveals. Each artist has a CERN scientist for an inspiration partner. So, for example, Julius von Bismarck was partnered with James Wells who is a hidden worlds specialist, as well as being involved with the new Collider so he is particularly interesting because he s a theorist who s also involved with experimentation. This pairing came as a result of the artists induction, during which they meet a variety of different scientists. Over four days, the scientists introduce the artists to particle physics, while Koek observes the interactions and chooses a suitable inspiration partner. The scientists get involved with the artists due to interventions in the laboratory, Koek expands. For example, Gilles Jobin recently took over the CERN cafeteria and turned it into a live dance rehearsal space. These kinds of interventions get scientists involved. They also experienced an intervention in the library, where dancers wanted to be invisible, as well as a performance in the anti-matter hall, and these gave them new perspectives in their working lives. The library intervention was a very meditative piece, exploring the sublime focus of both the scientist and the artist. Koek believes that there are many parallels between art and physics. For example, art works in different dimensions such as the theoretical and the experimental just as particle physics does. Consequently there are two strands in the annual Collide@CERN programme. The first known as Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN is an award for artists working with digital media and is conducted in collaboration with CERN s first official international cultural partner, renowned arts, society and technology organisation Ars Electronica, Austria. The other strand, Collide@CERN Geneva, was for choreography in its first year and will be in film next time. In future, I d love to do something with architecture or design and I have quite a few other ideas in the pipeline, but it s all absolutely reliant on external funding, Koek muses. External funding is critical because no money is supplied by CERN. This is because CERN is a publicly funded laboratory for science, technology and engineering. The programme is not scientifically based in the sense that it doesn t use the arts to illustrate black holes or anything so literal. It s about bringing the arts and science together in the same place as research disciplines on the same level, instead of one Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17 6

7 instrumentalising the other. Art has often been used to illustrate science, or the arts have instrumentalised science to become art, but this is about honouring the expertise and knowledge that both artists and scientists have, and sharing this for the purpose of artistic and scientific research. Intuition and creativity are something that they both share. An essential factor for Koek is to place arts and science on the same level. Previously, artists were brought in randomly, yet the scientists have been brought together from the best around the world and are selected for their skills, she states. This left a massive gulf between the quality of the artists and that of the scientists. We ve looked to bring parity in the quality and selectivity of the artists to ensure equality and mutual respect. That s why CERN has its first arts policy, Great Arts for Great Science. Although the funding comes from several external channels such as the Canton and City of Geneva, Prix Ars Electronica, private donors and individuals there is no formal funding stream into which this programme fits. Because it s a cutting-edge thing, with science and the arts at the same standard, we are leading the way and stimulating discussion at EU level as policy starts changing, Koek suggests. It s a real challenge right now, and it will be interesting to see funding changing, even if it may be too late for my programme. It s promoting change and that is great for the future. Koek, however, has high hopes for the arts at CERN despite the challenges being faced. It s extremely exciting to consider what we have, she says. The residents come for just a few months and it s not about expected outcomes; we re not going to get a piece of finished art out of it straight away after just two months. One scientist asked where the artists work was, so I asked him to think about how long it s taken him to do his experiment: 14 years was his answer. It s interesting bringing those layers together, to show that there is some commonality and to change perceptions. With Julius von Bismarck, for example, you will see within the following few years how his art was impacted by his residency at CERN and the kind of creative collisions he had here with scientists. Even more unexpected was such a collision between two artists: Koek anticipates that a piece of von Bismark s art may well be featured with Jobin s choreography in the future. All of these unexpected things can happen once you start the process and they can take really interesting turns, she reveals. The ripple effect of these encounters at CERN is extraordinary for all of those involved. Koek describes her programme as CERN s other experiment that concentrates on elements even more elusive than the Higgs boson: human ingenuity, creativity and imagination. Those elements are the ones that string artists and scientists together, she declares. As particle physicists are used to looking at the biggest questions down to the smallest, they are intrigued by everything, making them natural partners to artists, who have even staged an intervention in the CERN library CERN Public Service Review: European Science & Technology: issue 17

Accelerators for health

Accelerators for health Members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra play Music for CERN's Large Hadron Collider by Ralph Schutti at the launch of the book, LHC: Large Hadron Collider, at the Ars Electronica Festival. Making