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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 an impactCERN’s core mission is fundamental research, but more than ever its work has an impact on the world at large. News from the seminar at CERN on 13 December on the search for the Higgs boson went out to over a billion people, through coverage in the media worldwide. From young children to professional artists, the name CERN is reaching many new audiences who are inspired by its work and its people.

Sharing its knowledge with society is an important part of CERN’s mission, and it extends far beyond the headline-making results. By driving innovation, developing forefront technologies,

stimulating international collaboration and training a new

generation of scientists, CERN shares the benefits of its work

with other fields in research, industry and education.

Innovation and openness The KT Fund is a new financial scheme to support the transfer

of inventions made at CERN to society. In 2011, its first year,

six projects were selected for nurturing. These range from the

development of sensors for flame detection and early earthquake

prediction to the production of exotic radioisotopes for use in

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medicine. The technologies involved have potential applications in education, hadron therapy, astronomy, homeland security, environmental safety and energy recovery.

In 2009, in the spirit of open science, electronics designers working in experimental-physics laboratories set up the Open Hardware Repository. The aim — to exchange knowledge across a wide community. Now the hardware design for more than 40 projects can be shared using the CERN Open Hardware Licence, published in 2011. The licence manages intellectual property by governing the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products.

CERN has spearheaded Open Access publishing for several years. Thanks to negotiations with the publishing industry, all of the results from the LHC experiments have been published this way in leading journals, many in 2011. These articles are published under Creative Commons licenses, which allow unlimited re-use of the information, while giving credit to the original authors. Another milestone in 2011 was the successful conclusion of the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), which was coordinated by CERN with the participation of publishers, libraries and funding agencies, and co-funded by the European Commission. The project identified the gap between the worldwide support among scientists for high-quality Open Access journals and the barriers that prevent them paying for publication.

CERN’s flagship Open Access project is the Sponsoring Consortum for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). This aims to convert the publishing system in particle physics to Open Access by redirecting funds currently used for the purchase of journal subscriptions. Institutes in Korea and Japan joined in 2011, bringing the total number of countries involved to 28. In September, with 80.5% of the required funding pledged, and the remainder in progress, a procurement process was launched to identify publishing partners.

Open Access also implies efficient access to information, and to this end CERN is working with other particle-physics laboratories (DESY in Germany, Fermilab and SLAC in the US) on INSPIRE, the successor to the long-serving SPIRES database. During the second part of the year INSPIRE moved from its ‘beta’ phase to production and will replace SPIRES in 2012. At the same time, despite the increasing emphasis on digital information, more people come to the CERN Library to read and to study.

CERN in EuropeCERN continues its successful participation in the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for research. In 2011, 20 new EU projects started, bringing the total number of projects since FP7 began in 2007 to almost 70, nearly half of which are co-ordinated by CERN. This total includes 17 project proposals selected for funding in 2011. CERN co-ordinates six of these, including projects to train researchers by complementing the CERN fellowship programme and by establishing Initial Training Networks for radiation dosimetry, radiation detection

CERN participated in the 2011 World Engineers’ Convention in Geneva in September, highlighting the Laboratory’s engineering

excellence and the technological spinoffs stimulated by the design and construction of the LHC.

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Accelerators for health

Following the first Physics for Health workshop, held at the Laboratory in 2010, three initiatives linked to accelerators began to take shape at CERN in 2011.

• CERNBIO is a concept for an R&D facility to provide both light and heavy ions over a range of energies for biomedical applications. Assessing effects on biological samples would help the medical and radiobiological communities to improve risk estimation for exposures to ions and aid the further development of particle-based treatments. Such a facility could be constructed around the LEIR accelerator.

• Radioisotopes play an increasingly important role in cancer diagnosis, treatment and other clinical studies. CERN is assessing the viability of an ‘isotopes for research’ programme, based on a network of existing European facilities, which would secure an adequate supply of innovative radioisotopes for preclinical and clinical studies.

• Following on from the Proton Ion Medical Machine Study (PIMMS), which was carried out in the 1990s at CERN, PIMMS2 was launched in 2011. The goal is an advanced design for an accelerator complex (accelerator, transfer lines and gantries) that will be more compact, reliable and cost-effective for cancer treatment with hadrons. Phase 1 of the project began with a call to the appropriate communities for proposals, which will be assessed in order to provide guidance to the international design group.

In a separate initiative, CERN has teamed up with the Spanish institute CIEMAT and industry to develop the smallest possible cyclotron to produce isotopes for use in positron emission tomography.

instrumentation, and ultra-fast photon detectors with potential medical applications.

A prestigious European Research Council advanced grant was awarded to the PH Department. Highly competitive and sought-after, these grants are given to excellent researchers to pursue ground-breaking work. Last but not least, the proposal for a design study for the LHC luminosity upgrade was ranked first out of more than 70 proposals for Research Infrastructure projects and received a score of 15/15 — the highest that a CERN proposal has received under FP7.

Health matters The European Network for Light Ion Hadron Therapy (ENLIGHT) was established in 2002 to bring together the common European efforts in hadron therapy. Co-ordinated by CERN, it has more than 300 participants from 20 countries. It has been instrumental in securing funding for research activities in hadron therapy, and CERN now co-ordinates three EU-funded projects – PARTNER,

ENVISION, ENTERVISION — as well as one of the three pillars of the EU infrastructure project ULICE. In 2011 ENLIGHT began to develop strategic plans for the future. Some 100 members of the network gathered in Marburg in September to review the status of the existing projects and assess the status of hadron therapy worldwide.

PARTNER is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network, launched in 2008. Three training courses were organized during 2011 on: treatment planning for cancer radiotherapy with protons and ions; clinical trials; and mathematical modelling for biological and physical processes. ENVISION is a collaboration of European research centres and industrial partners, formed in 2010, which aims at developing novel imaging techniques for safer and more precise hadron therapy. The first results were published in 2011. In February, a new Marie Curie Initial Training Network called ENTERVISION started with the aim of training young researchers in online 3D digital imaging for hadron therapy. Three of the researchers are based at CERN.

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Investing in the futureEach year, CERN organizes schools to introduce its research and technology to a new generation of scientists around the world. In 2011, the European School of High-Energy Physics — the direct descendent of the original CERN Schools — took place in Romania for the first time, attracting participants from more than 30 countries. This school was the model for the CERN-Latin-American School of High-Energy Physics (CLASHEP), established in 2001 to engage young Latin American scientists in experimental particle physics. Ten years later, a record number of students attended the 6th CLASHEP school, in Natal, Brazil.

The CERN Accelerator School (CAS) organizes courses for accelerator physicists and engineers. In 2011, a specialized course on high-power hadron machines was arranged with ESS-Bilbao, Spain, and an intermediate course on accelerator physics took place in Greece in collaboration with the University of the Aegean. CAS was also instrumental in the revival of the Joint US-CERN-Russia-Japan School, which offered a course on synchrotron radiation and free-electron lasers, held in Italy.

To motivate students not yet at university to become interested in modern physics, CERN offers their science teachers two types of courses: the in-depth three-week international High School Teacher Programme and the one-week ‘national’ programmes, given in the teachers’ native languages. In 2011, 31 courses took place, attended by 1112 teachers from more than 30 countries. The education strategy also embraces video-conferences and video-lectures, which are requested by schools around the

world. During the year, more than 100 of these were held with

schools in Europe, the US, Asia and South America.

CERN on show Since April 2009 the latest incarnation of CERN’s travelling

exhibition has been touring through some of the Organization’s

Member States. In 2011, it arrived in Austria, opening from

February to July at the Hartberg Ökopark, a science museum

some 100 km from Vienna. Owing to its size, this exhibition

usually stays in a country for several months, which means a long

waiting list. Now it has a smaller sibling — a ‘mini-exhibition’ that

can move more easily from place to place. It provides a visual

overview of the main aspects of CERN, with written explanations

on LCD screens. The mini-exhibition’s first port of call was in

Budapest, in May. It later visited Romania, Poland and Greece.

A cultural firstIn August, CERN launched its first cultural policy for engaging

with the arts — ‘Great Arts for Great Science’. The policy’s

central strategy is to introduce a selection process for high-

quality arts engagement. To ensure this, CERN appointed a

Cultural Board consisting of four leaders in the arts from CERN’s

Host States and a physicist from CERN. The board will select

one or two arts projects a year to receive a letter of approval

from CERN, enabling them to seek external funding for particle-

physics inspired work.

In 2011, CERN welcomed 255 students to its well known Summer Student programme for undergraduates in physics, engineering

and computing.

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Another strand of the cultural policy is for CERN to form partnerships with leading international arts organizations for an artists’ residency programme, Collide@CERN. The first partnership is with Ars Electronica in Austria. CERN was the main focus of the 2011 Ars Electronica Festival (see p. 31), where the competition for the first Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN residency in digital arts was launched in September. After assessing 395 entries from 40 countries, the jury awarded the prize to the German artist, Julius von Bismarck, in December.

CERN’s first artist in residence, Julius von Bismarck (right), with

inspiration partner, theoretician James Wells.

Scientists in the making

In the first half of the year, some 650 schoolchildren, aged 9–12, from the local region took part in ‘Be a scientist for a day’ (Dans la peau d'un chercheur), a project organized by CERN, Geneva University and education authorities in the Pays de Gex and Geneva. Running from February to June, it aimed to introduce the schoolchildren to the methods of experimental science by inviting them to identify the contents of unopened boxes. They had to come up with hypotheses, carry out experiments, and then interpret their results. On 24 June, at the end of the project, the budding scientists came together, both in person or via a webcast, to attend a conference at CERN, at which the President of CERN Council, Michel Spiro, gave a talk.