Large Hadron Collider scientist to give public lecture June 12 in downtown Chicago

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Lyn Evans, former LHC project manager, will give a public lecture at the TIPP 2011 conference on Sunday, June 12. Image: © 2008 CERN

Managing the construction and day-to-day operations of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is not just any typical job. In a public lecture on Sunday, June 12 from 3-4:30 p.m. at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in Chicago, physicist Lyn Evans will share his experience as the project manager for the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The lecture, titled “Marvel of Technology: the LHC, machine and experiments,” is free and open to the public. Attendance is first come, first served.

From its inception in 1994 until the start of operations in 2008, Evans led the project to build the LHC, an engineering marvel located 330 feet below the border of Switzerland and France that spans 16.5 miles in circumference. By accelerating hair-thin beams of particles to a whisker below the speed of light, physicists use the gigantic instrument to study the nature of matter, energy, space and time. More than 10,000 scientists, engineers and students from almost 60 nations contributed to the construction of the LHC. With data continuously pouring in, scientists are in the process of combing through trillions of particle collisions in search of new physics. Evans will provide an overview of the accelerator, its four gargantuan experiments and their scientific goals.

The public lecture is part of the conference on Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics 2011 (TIPP 2011), which takes place from June 9-14 in Chicago. The conference is sponsored in part by Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. TIPP 2011 provides a venue for scientists and engineers from around the world to discuss innovative detector development and instrumentation for particle physics, astrophysics and closely related fields that challenge the barriers of current technologies.

For more information about the TIPP 2011 conference, visit: http://conferences.fnal.gov/tipp11/