Newsflash

Geneva, 12 December 2014. CERN announced today at the 174th session of the CERN Council that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is gearing up for its second three-year run. The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world and the whole 27-kilometre superconducting machine is now almost cooled to its nominal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero. All teams, including the VUB particle physicists working in the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies are at work to get the LHC and CMS back online. Run 2 of the LHC will start in March 2015 and follows a 2-year technical stop that prepared the machine for running at almost double the energy of the LHC’s first run.

Geneva, 20 November 2014. CERN1 launched today its Open Data Portal where data from real collision events, produced by the LHC experiments will for the first time be made openly available to all. It is expected that these data will be of high value for the research community, and also be used for education purposes.
”Launching the CERN Open Data Portal is an important step for our Organization. Data from the LHC programme are among the most precious assets of the LHC experiments, that today we start sharing openly with the world. We hope these open data will support and inspire the global research community, including students and citizen scientists,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.

Particle physicists have a hard job in identifying the elementary particles created in their accelerators. But now researchers from Belgium and Sweden have designed an artificial material that makes it easier to distinguish these particles.

On October 6, 2014 Sunita JANSSENSWILLEN obtained the Academic degree of
DOCTOR in SCIENCE with the following doctoral thesis:

A combined molecular, behavioral and evolutionary study on pheromone communication during amphibian courtship

promotor :Prof. Dr. Franky Bossuyt