CERN Open Day '08: can you help?

23 January 2008

The CERN Open day is very popular

The 2008 CERN Open Days are a unique opportunity for you to become involved in an event showcasing the ATLAS experiment by members of the ATLAS collaboration.

All ATLAS technicians, physicists, and engineers are invited to volunteer to help out over the two days: on Saturday, 5th April, the doors are open for half the day to CERN collaborators in a wide sense (each person with a CERN access card can come with a small group of people), while on Sunday, 6th April, the local public will have all day to visit CERN and learn about the work we are doing here.

The Open Day will focus on the LHC and its experiments. CERN plans to make as many LHC points accessible as possible within the constraints imposed by safety. Concertation with the mayors of the local communes has already started and the aim is to allow the public to visit “their” (local) installation.

Needless to say, ATLAS will play a very important role during the Open Days. As far as the local public is concerned, “CERN” is the CERN Meyrin site – it is even written on buses! We are expecting around 2500 persons to visit the ATLAS experiment, and the same number of people will visit the LHC tunnel at point 1.

There are many infrastructure questions to tackle, but a CERN-wide task force is already working on them.  We in ATLAS should concentrate on designing a visitor’s programme for our experiment that is as complete and interesting as possible. To do so, you can register following the call for volunteers in the present CERN Bulletin or on the CERN website. Make sure to mark “ATLAS” as your interest (via the option “LHC visit points” in the Web interface)!

We will hold a first preparatory meeting next Wednesday, 30th January at 10:00 in the Salle Curie, room 40-S2-C01. A baseline programme with presentations and the visit tour is already proposed, and there is a lot of interesting work to do in setting it up. And we are open and happy to receive any new ideas!

Colin Barras

 

Helfried Burckhart

CERN