ALICE exhibition + CERN Control Centre visit for openlab summer students

Thursday 6 Aug 2026, 08:30 → 11:15 Europe/Zurich

SG parking (CERN)

We announce the second guided visit for the openlab summer students 2026!

The visit will take place on Thursday, 6 August, from 8:30 to 11:00, and will give you the opportunity to explore ALICE exhibition and CERN Control Centre (CCC). 

Students will be divided into two groups and follow a parallel schedule to visit both locations. We will meet and go by bus to the location.

To attend the visit, please fill out the registration form and select your preferred group. Registration is mandatory for participation.

Meeting point location:

The bus leaves at 8:30 from the SG parking (behind building 81 – Science Gateway)- map

Please, come to the parking 10 minutes in advance. 

Group A	Group B
ALICE exhibition 8:50 - 9:40	CCC 8:50 - 9:40
CCC 10:10 - 11:00	ALICE exhibition 10:10 - 11:00

ALICE exhibition

ALICE is optimized to study the collisions of nuclei at the ultra-relativistic energies provided by the LHC. The aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities reached so far in the laboratory. In such conditions, an extreme phase of matter - called the quark-gluon plasma - is formed. Our universe is thought to have been in such a primordial state for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, before quarks and gluons were bound together to form protons and neutrons. Recreating this primordial state of matter in the laboratory and understanding how it evolves will allow us to shed light on questions about how matter is organized and the mechanisms that confine quarks and gluons. For this purpose, we are carrying out a comprehensive study of the hadrons, electrons, muons, and photons produced in the collisions of heavy nuclei (²⁰⁸Pb). ALICE is also studying proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions both as a comparison with nucleus-nucleus collisions and in their own right. In 2021, ALICE completed a significant upgrade of its detectors to further enhance its capabilities and continue its scientific journey at the LHC in Run 3 and 4, until the end of 2032. At the same time,  upgrade plans are being made for ALICE 3, the next-generation experiment for LHC Runs 5 and 6.

CCC Visit Point

The CERN Control Centre (CCC), including 39 operating tables, came into operation at the beginning of 2006. It combines the control rooms of the Laboratory’s eight accelerators as well as the operation of cryogenics and technical infrastructures.