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I recently returned from a two week trip to Europe where I had opportunity to meet with some very interesting and highly creative folks in several countries including Romania, Hungary, Germany, France and Switzerland.

It is clear from my visits that innovation in the realm of electronic interconnections is alive and well in Europe. Perhaps nowhere is this more the case than at CERN, the international particle physics research center in Geneva, Switzerland, home to the largest machine in the world, the 27 kilometer super collider known at the LHC or large hadron collider.

The collider, which is the basic product of CERN itself, is comprised of some 9300 very large magnets in a circle operating at -271C which is about 2 degrees above absolute zero. With this machine now completed CERN has become the world’s focal point for advanced subatomic particle research. I can testify that the place was abuzz with activity while I was there.

I arrived the day after the inauguration of the LHC held on October 21st. The event was reportedly attended by a few thousand guests from around the globe including heads of state, various politicians and top scientists and engineers including a number of Nobel laureates.

Because the exhibits had not yet been dissembled from the day before, I was treated to a visit of them in the company of my host by Erik Van Der Bij. Erik heads the circuit manufacturing facility and a very creative electronic module development team at CERN.

The size and scope of the LHC project are truly mind boggling. Just as mind boggling are the various detectors that have been developed to try an identify the last elusive bits of subatomic matter that many believe hold the key to scientists finally getting the full picture of where matter and energy meet, the Higgs boson and as well to hopefully identify the equally elusive and mysterious dark matter that physicists believe makes up most of the universe.

To be honest, it is still a bit much, for a dilettante such I am in matters of atomic physics, to fully grasp all of the details but there was something magical about being in the presence of the systems. Just being there seemed to help me get a better handle on what is happening or what will be happening when they get around to actually colliding particles head on into one another at 99.99 percent of the speed of light.

I have over the years had the good fortune to have been involved of the manufacture of many different electronic interconnection devices that were designed for use in high energy physics experiments including the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto CA, for the National Accelerator at FermiLab in Batavia Illinois, and the particle beam fusion accelerator (PBFA) at Sandia National labs at Albuquerque NM to name a few. With the exception of the PBFA experiment at Sandia which I saw and understood reasonably well, due to the straight forward nature of the project, I have not had a similar understanding of the complexities and subtleties of high energy particle detection until my visit to CERN.

The electronic sensing systems that they have built are electronics writ large. VERY LARGE… At 45 meters long, more than 25 meters high, and weighing about 7,000 tons, the ATLAS experiment is the largest. To put that in perspective, it is about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs about the same as the Eiffel Tower according to CERNs public relations folks.

For the ALICE experiment, the LHC will collide lead ions into one another to attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang under laboratory conditions. It is not know if they told the ROHS folks of their plans to use lead but they hope to produce and study with those lead ions, a state of matter known as quark gluon plasma, a state of matter which is believed to have existed soon after the Big Bang when the universe was still unimaginably hot. According to the scientists involved the hope is to be able to study the quark-gluon plasma as it expands and cools, observing how it progressively gives rise to the particles that constitute the matter of our Universe today. It is all clearly some pretty heady stuff.

There is not time to go into all of the details of the various other experiments that are planned for CERN, indeed, I don’t have yet have familiarity with all of them myself, but if this has sparked any interest, I recommend you visit the CERN website at www.cern.ch to get more information on this amazing machine and the discoveries they hope to make. You will be impressed.

Thanks for listening, until next time…