Installation of photovoltaic panels on the roof of CC-IN2P3
16 January 2025
Japan-France Workshop on Information Technology
20 February 2025
Visit to the CMS detector at CERN
On 21 January 2025, Adriano Di Florio, a researcher with the CCLab team at the CC-IN2P3 and an official guide at CERN, gave a tour to around twenty agents of the underground cavern housing the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, located about 100 metres below ground near Cessy, France (just across the Swiss border).
The CMS itself is a versatile detector installed on the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) ring. Cylindrical in structure, it is built in several concentric layers, including a powerful superconducting magnet generating a gigantic magnetic field of 4 teslas, or about 100,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field.
Weighing a colossal 14,000 tonnes, this detector is designed to explore a wide range of areas of physics, from identifying particles such as the Higgs boson and top and bottom quarks to searching for exotic phenomena such as supersymmetry and the constituents of dark matter.
The agents had the opportunity to explore this impressive facility for half a day, allowing them to better understand the context in which they work. The IN2P3 Computing Centre manages several petabytes of data per year and provides essential computing power for LHC experiments, including ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE.
Descent into the infinitely small
The cavern is approximately 53 metres long, 27 metres wide and 24 metres high, providing enough space to house the CMS detector. The main access is via a vertical shaft approximately 20 metres in diameter, used for installing the various parts of the structure, while a tunnel provides access for maintenance. The environment consists of concrete and rock, with advanced ventilation, cooling and safety systems to manage heat and radiation. The temperature is kept stable at around 15°C, and humidity is controlled to prevent corrosion of the equipment.
As the CMS detector is periodically shut down for maintenance and upgrades, access to the cavern is currently available: an opportunity not to be missed for the CC-IN2P3!
CERN Science Gateway
To round off your discovery of CMS, there’s nothing like a visit to the Science Gateway museum.
The museum’s immersive scenography brilliantly explains the remarkable complexity of the machines, and the interactive experiences were of particular interest to the agents.
The multimedia exhibitions provide a better understanding of CERN’s research and explore the everyday applications of the technologies developed.
Now, particle physics holds no secrets for the engineers at the Computing Centre!
Information: Opened in 2023, the museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free: https://sciencegateway.cern/index.php/
Photo credits: ©Nadine Locatelli – CC-IN2P3 / CNRS
