Today I am at the halfway point of my CERN Synapse Fellowship; also today I have entered the second phase of my project, undertaking my first high energy physics experiment.*

It was another unique day at CERN today. There was a strange tension in the air, as it was the final day of the CERN 70 celebrations, with various VIPs and heads of state on site, security guards were to be seen, and convoys of dark cars kept driving past (I think the DG was asking them for money to build the FCC). And finally, through a combination of charm and chance, and a lot of planning, I undertook an experiment! This was with the CTF3 / CLEAR accelerator, part of “CLIC”, the Compact Linear Accelerator, one of the proposed future CERN projects (but a project / future which has been put on hold, yet this allows for more free experimentation in the present).

My experiment is to try to capture particles and energy within a block of acrylic,  and create a kind of “Lichtenberg Tree”, like a bolt of lightning frozen in a piece of glass. This is quite a process, and it began, perhaps symbolically,  with the oldest working machine at CERN, a beautiful router from the 1950’s which we used to shape the acrylic blocks. These blocks were then inserted into one of the newest CERN machines, the CLEAR accelerator. I was working with Wilfrid Farabolini, a very hands-on physicist, who was continually tweaking and tuning the accelerator just to get the variables right, like he was playing some kind of electronic musical instrument. This is a sure sign that we are working with real physics, real materiality, as nature doesn’t always behave the way you think it should. Shooting individual bunches of electrons into these blocks, trying to “trap” them in their energetic state, is quite a delicate process and takes hours, and then it all has to settle overnight. Tomorrow I’ll find out if and how this experiment worked out…

*the CLIC physicists said dumping the LHC was my 1st experiment!