My CLIC experiment worked, almost too well! The experiment captured the electron energy beam in a unique and unanticipated way, even the physicists were surprised by the result. One said that he had “never seen such a concrete manifestation of radiation!” And yes, it has captured the radiation, in fact it was still radioactive a day later, and had to be stored securely until the unknown half-life was down to a safe level. But it has created a unique form, a frozen beam of particle pulsations, energy embedded into matter. And it is quite rare to get beamtime at CERN, not to mention doing things like this.

And in other news, I have been sonifying various types of accelerator and detector data, with interesting results, working towards a big project… Also, I have donated my book  “Mudstone” (from my 2016 Synapse residency) to the CERN library, with encouragement from the library director, with maybe a book talk coming up; and the CERN archives requested that my “When Worlds Collide” montage to be added to their media archives, which is a very nice thing, this project began in their archives and has now come full circle. It is publicly available to view via the CERN archive portal: https://videos.cern.ch/record/2300645

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!

Some sociologists use a “W curve” to describe the experiences of people undertaking international exchange programs, where they go through stages of excitement, then difficulty, then normalisation then more difficulties (see here). I think it is more like a sine wave, with ongoing up and down phases. Today for example I’ve just been walking up and down corridors, going around and around getting nowhere in this labyrinth, like I have become some kind of hall crawler.

another day of exciting discoveries and developments… what can i say without giving it away? things are really CLICking into place…!

Over the last few days I have been exploring some of the “material archives”, huge warehouses full of equipment, and I found an old project I had been working on, a re-activation of a “LEP cavity”, a resonator from the Large Electron Positron accelerator, the precursor the the Large Hadron Collider. This has been moved to my new “studio space”, basically a segment of an old circular accelerator complex from the 1960s, under the artificial hill near the water tower where the glowing sheep are. This somewhat decrepit building was repurposed to build the giant magnets for the LHC, and is now mainly used to store stuff (including radioactive objects, but that zone is off limits), so it’s ideal for me, and I can be as loud as need be. After 3 weeks it’s time to get things activated…

What does it mean to dump the beam?

A few hours after I inadvertently crashed the LHC (see previous post) I went back to celebrate CERN’s (and the world’s) highest luminosity on record,  100 inverse femtobarns, which means 100 billion protons sent around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC every 25 nanoseconds. As Mike Lamont said, this stuff really is crazy! I felt a bit weird and guilty returning to the scene of the crime so to speak. But when i arrived the beam was ramping up again and there was a Swiss style party in full swing! The aftermath equals the after party. Where’s the cheese? I got a high-five from Mike, so the experiment seems to have worked!

Even though my “irregular” beam dump was not directly my fault, it was ultimately caused by me. As I asked Mike, if I had flipped that switch a second or even a millisecond later, that one stray proton flying out from the beam probably / probabilistically would not have occurred. But it did, which flipped a bit in a control chip (showing the materiality of data), which created a cascade of errors and the subsequent shutdown of the LHC (and just before the party!). This made me think of the threefold  / three way relationship between human, machine and quantum. As I said to Mike, it all goes down to quantum phenomena and the stochastic uniqueness of such events, and the effects they have on both apparatuses and humans. All this from a flick of a switch – is this my first real artwork since commencing my ANAT fellowship here?

And now as I look out the CERN hostel window, a shadow seems to shadow hanging over me – the shadow of Shiva / Natraj, doing the dance of creation and destruction. I had a strange kind of nightmare where I was trying to explain the philosophy of physics to a bunch of disgruntled people, whilst a heavy metal band was playing at a deafening level behind me. And this is not the first nightmare I’ve had about this place – the first time I came here I had a dream where I was trapped in the labyrinth of labs, then finally escaped to find myself in another dimension full of Durga Demons. (there’s no AI on this blog, but he is a link to an AI thing I did (but it’s OK because it was years ago) – the CERN Shiva dream.

Another unique day, and yet still more crazy! After a mindblowing visit to various high-energy accelerator test facilities with CERN’s accelerator director Mike Lamont (more on that later maybe), I went to the Cern Control Centre and had a unique chance to “dump the beam” of the LHC, i.e. to turn it off temporarily so it can be reset and safely re-energised.

Yet when I did, something went wrong and it basically crashed! But it wasn’t my fault!! And hours later it’s still not back on.. let’s hope they get it running tonight, as it’s their >100/fB celebration party.

Here it is in action-packed slo-mo video!

and here’s the trace of the event embedded in the LHC data stream..

p.s. this is not the first time I have accidently crashed a particle accelerator!.. in fact it all started in 2007 with the “cicada experiment” I did during my first ANAT residency at the Australian Synchrotron – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0so0McL_-0

Yesterday was CERN’s 70th birthday party, and it was massive (in many ways).

The day started off with an important physics discovery announced in the main auditorium, the mass of the “W” boson, one of the fundamental subatomic particles. I attended a 1 hour presentation by Josh Bendavid, which was very complex and detailed (most of it going over my head) but it was amazing to see him describing every aspect of the experiment and calculations without missing a beat, then when he presented the final slide, revealing the measurement of the “W” particle, the room burst out in cheers and rounds of applause. There was really an energy in the air!

In a way this experiment, which has been ongoing in the LHC for years, with 100 million “W” boson events recorded in the CMS detector, was a big test for the “Standard Model”, the system or equation which describes how most of the universe appears to behave, the summation of over a century of physics. Curiously, the previous measure of this, at Fermilab in the USA, gave a measurement which did not support the predictions the standard model makes, leading to some angst in the bosonic circles. So it wasn’t surprising that Josh said in the conclusion, “the standard model survives for the moment…”

Then it was party time, with a massive stage, birthday cake for everyone, bars every where (only 2 drink tokens per person, but that measurement soon went out the window!) A line up of bands started with the blues brothers-esque group direct from(or to) Fermilab Chicago doing (slo-mo) burnouts around the stage, then a bunch of other CERN bands, including “Les Horrible Cernettes”, the first band to put a photo of themselves on the internet (who invented social media?), and other acts ranging from heavy metal to orchestral. In their own special way, these people know how to put on a show!

In a way, my journeys into the past of CERN, and previous posts regarding the social and material history of this place, all seemed to resonate last night. And soon it will be time to both look into the future, and engaging on a more practice-based level i.e. doing some art!

(and the answer (to the “W” mass (maybe not life the universe and everything) is = 80360.2 Mev)) I did a little capture of the moment, using a time-echo effect to create a trail or path of the movement of Josh’s mouse tracks (which reveals the things he was pointing at mainly, but also the way he was whirling around these nodes, like an excited particle!

Tonight, in the main CERN auditorium, I gave a presentation, as part of the CMS conference, about my previous and upcoming projects with the art@CMS program (which I found somewhat daunting actually). And, above the grand staircase to Building 500 (the main building, where the auditorium is) some of my video projects were being screened, including “When Worlds Collide“, a montage of found footage from the CERN archives, which is literally beneath this building, which was quite a poetic moment.

Passing by the old and overgrown “particle garden”, a.k.a. the “Microcosm”, a kind of memorial / resting place for several “ancestral machines” developed at CERN in the 1960s and 1970s, such Gargamelle (top left, an old friend!), and the BEBC (Big European Bubble Chamber), which is a bit like an Apollo-era spaceship… Also, a rare sighting of the CERN sheep, which keep the grass low in the ex-experimental zones where people don’t want to go (and yes they kind of glow).