On Thursday 18 September 2008, members of the CERN Management welcomed recently recruited staff members and fellows at the second part of the Induction Programme. They are photographed here with Enrico Chiaveri, Head of the Human Resources Department.

The Film-Making Club was created in 2005, and already has ten short films to its credit. Spotlight on a club that does more than making movies! Making a film requires solid teamwork and genuine commitment. In addition to shooting, which requires at least five people in key roles—plus the actors!—there is also the work of casting, location work, choice of equipment and techniques, logistics (hardware, costume design etc.) and post-production, which includes film editing and soundtrack.What does it take to make a film? It involves a marriage of the power of the imagination, the technical constraints and the actors’ performances, explains Quentin King, the current president and founder of the club. You need a real synthesis of art and technique, he adds. For club member Neal Hartman, the French word réalisateur really reflects this aspect of the work, where you need to imagine something, then reconceptualise it in terms of its feasibility in order to realise it in the best possible way. Essentially, you have to find a way of transforming a dream into a visual reality. The club members have already realised a few dreams in various forms. In 2007 the club, still in its infancy, organised the CinéGlobe festival, bringing to CERN’s Globe, recently inaugurated as a communication forum, a festival of short films and audiovisual workshops. The festival accepted 1450 entries from 80 countries, representing 100 hours of screen time, which the selection board whittled down to 5 hours. The work of the committee went far beyond that, however: sponsors had to be found, partnerships set up, logistics organised. The result: a thousand visitors flocked to the Globe in just three days. The audiovisual workshops brought together professionals and enthusiasts around short films, spawning further workshops and lectures and incidentally providing film people from all around the Lake Geneva area with a valuable networking opportunity. If there was no 2008 edition, this was largely because of a lack of available time to meet all the demands involved. There was certainly no lack of demand from professionals and the public alike. We had plenty of enquiries about a repeat event, concludes Jacques-Hervé Fichet, the former club president who was behind the project. The club’s motto remains: learn by doing. That’s why, in addition to the films currently in the pipeline, Quentin King and Neal Hartman are, respectively, organising and participating in the 48 Hour Film Project. This event, which in 2007 was held in 55 cities around the world, is refereed by a professional jury. The goal is to advance film-making and promote film-makers with local and international distribution, as a final festival brings together all of the winning entries in each city. The competition comes to Geneva for the first time on 10-12 October 2008. The challenge is to make a complete movie, from script to post-production, in just 48 hours, starting with the allocation of a random movie genre to each team. Not content with organising the event, the club has put together its own team. A few volunteers are still needed! Are you up for a 48-hour sprint? If you want to be a member of our film-making team, learn more about the club, help with the organising of the competition or find the website of the competition, go to http://info-oye.web.cern.ch/info-oye/

The official ceremony for the inauguration of the LHC with Heads of State and Ministers from CERN’s Member States, to be held on Tuesday 21 October, will be followed by an LHCfest to thank all those who took part in bringing the accelerator to completion. The invitation will be sent in the next few days by internal mail.The event has been made possible by generous donations from a range of companies and organizations. Practical information for CERN personnel involved 1. REGISTRATION will be at the Globe of Science and Innovation - invited members of personnel: follow instructions on your invitation card; - volunteers: you will receive instructions via e-mail. 2. SHUTTLE SERVICE There will be no access to the inauguration site for private vehicles. A shuttle service will be provided from the Globe of Science and Innovation between 7:30 and 11:30 for members of the personnel involved in the organization and thereafter for all invited guests: Shuttle departures for all invited guests after registration and security check as indicated on personal invitation cards; Return shuttles from ceremony location, back to reserved parkings start at 18:00. Regularly updated maps available at: http://www.cern.ch/LHC2008/inauguration/traffic.html LHCfest After the official ceremony, the party will go on at the same location to involve and thank all Cernois – physicists, engineers, technicians and administrators – who took part in the LHC adventure and who could not be invited to the Official Inauguration ceremony. Since the maximum capacity of the LHCfest location is limited to about 3000 people, an invitation will be sent in the next few days by internal mail to all members of personnel (blue card) and to members of the other categories (users, retired staff and industrial support) invited by the departments and LHC experiments. PROGRAMME 18:30 Musique municipale de Meyrin and LHC films; 20:00 Address by Director-General Robert Aymar; 20:15 Introduction by Frans Lanting and visual concert Origins; 20:30-22:30 Buffet service; 21:30 Concerts by Cernettes and Canettes; 23:30 End of LHCfest. PRACTICAL INFO Therewill be no access to the LHCfest site for private vehicles. Please use the shuttle service from the designated car parks on the Meyrin and Prévessin sites. Shuttle departures will start at 18:30. The last return shuttle to the Meyrin and Prévessin car parks will be at 23:30. … And more Highlights As already indicated in previous Bulletin articles, innovation will be the leitmotiv of the two events. A central highlight of both the LHC inauguration and the LHCfest will be a special visual concert. More info on the LHC2008 website: http://www.cern.ch/lhc2008 ORIGINS Adapted from LIFE: A Journey Through Time ORIGINS is a celebration of the wonder of the cosmos and the glory of life on Earth, as expressed through the imagery of National Geographic resident photographer Frans Lanting and the music of Philip Glass. Specially commissioned by CERN for the ceremony to inaugurate the Large Hadron Collider, ORIGINS is a 20-minute adaptation of the original, one-hour, multimedia production LIFE: A Journey Through Time, featuring Frans Lanting’s photographs and Philip Glass’s music, choreographed by Alexander V. Nichols. Performed by a symphony orchestra with projected images, LIFE interprets the history of life on Earth from its earliest beginnings with the Big Bang to its present diversity. Performed by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Carolyn Kuan. Concepts and images by Frans Lanting, music by Philip Glass, arranged for orchestra by Michael Riesman, visual choreography by Alexander V. Nichols. Project editing by Christine Eckstrom.

Thanks to the first real signals received from the LHC while in operation before the incident, the experiments are now set to make the best use of the data they have collected. Report from the LHCC open session.The September open session of the LHCC (LHC Experiments Committee) came just a few days after the incident that occurred at the LHC. The packed auditorium was a testament to the huge interest raised by Lyn Evans’ talk about the status of the machine and the plans for the future. After being told that the actual consequences of the incident will be clear only once Sector 3-4 has been warmed up, the audience focussed on the reports from the experiments. For the first time, the reports showed performance results of the various detectors with particles coming from the machine and not just from cosmic rays or tests and simulations. The first days of LHC beam exceeded all expectations and the experiments made extensive and rapid use of the data they collected, says Terry Wyatt, LHCC Chairman. Projects of such magnitude cannot be achieved without setbacks and, although we now face an unwanted shutdown, the experiments are already planning how they will make the most effective possible use of the available time. The LHCC open sessions are unique occasions for key people from both the accelerator and the experiments to report on current activities. The talks are open to all at CERN and are webcast to reach a wider audience. They take place every two months and are set to become a must-see event in the months to come. Material (both presentations and video) from the September open session of the LHCC is available at: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=40697Next LHCC open session on Wednesday 19 November 2008.

Following the recent incident in Sector 3-4, which has brought the start-up of the LHC to a halt, the various teams are working hard to establish the cause, evaluate the situation and plan the necessary repairs. The LHC will be started up again in spring 2009 following the winter shutdown for the maintenance of all the CERN installations. The LHC teams are at work on warming up Sector 3-4 and establishing the cause of the serious incident that occurred on Friday, 19 September. Preliminary investigations suggest that the likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets. The connections probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure and a large leak of helium into the tunnel. However, the teams will not be able to carry out a full evaluation and assess the repairs needed until the sector has been warmed up again and inspected. We are not worried about repairing the magnets as spare parts are available, said Lyn Evans, the LHC Project Leader. As it will take three weeks to bring the sector to room temperature before repair work can begin, it will not be possible to restart the LHC before the winter maintenance period. The objective is thus to start the machine up again in the spring once the CERN accelerator complex has been recommissioned. We will bring the maintenance work on the accelerators forward so that we can start up again as quickly as possible in the spring, said Lyn Evans. The incident occurred when Sector 3-4 was being commissioned for operation at 5 TeV. The LHC commissioning team had taken advantage of a suspension of beam operation to test the magnets at a high current of more than 9000 amps. These essential electrical tests began in June 2007 and all the other sectors passed with flying colours. This was the last circuit of the last sector to be tested, making its failure all the more frustrating. Although this setback only a week after the spectacular start of operation with beam is a psychological blow, it was by no means beyond the bounds of possibility for a machine as innovative and complex as the LHC. The quality standards that had to be met both during the construction of the magnets and the interconnection work were exceptional, as befitted an exceptional machine. No fewer than 123,000 interconnections were needed for the 27 km circuit, including 65,000 electrical connections with superconducting cables. This complexity has been underlined in the many messages of support that CERN has received. Following the incident, the Director-General paid tribute to the teams that have worked on the construction, installation and commissioning of the LHC. The speed of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and to the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex, he underlined. I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigour and application.