Possibility of visits on Friday afternoon (25th October): ATLAS; SM18; Computer Centre. Participants may select one visit point. The maximum number of visitors per point is limited.

ATLAS is one of the two big multi-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The visit will include both the control room and the detector – a cylindrical structure of 45 m length and 25 m diameter situated some 90m underground and designed to reconstruct fully the collisions of protons with energy 7+7 TeV.

In order to reduce investment costs (compactness due to higher fields or gradients with great impact on civil engineering) and operating costs (energy efficiency) for large scale accelerators, superconducting magnets and accelerating cavities are considered as enabling technologies. Performance and quality of prototypes or series units have to be assessed. The SM18 test facility is the place at CERN where these elements can be tested, with dedicated infrastructure for cryogenics, powering and measurements. You will be able to see this unique large scale infrastructure as well as some technology with real size internal parts of the superconducting magnets or accelerating cavities.

The CERN computer centre hosts 3.5MW of IT equipment in 3 large distinct rooms.  2/3 of the IT equipment in the Centre is air cooled by a legacy ventilation system that was recently optimised.    The remaining equipment is cooled in modern water-cooled racks that were installed during the past years. During the visit, you will have the opportunity to see the computing rooms hosting the servers and the tape libraries and to discuss how the Computer Centre is operated and cooled down.