Speaker
Description
The Large Hadron Collider and its detectors are currently stopped and are benefiting from upgrade and renovation work. This period, called the “long shutdown”, has started at the end of 2018 and will end in May 2021. This maintenance break is an exceptional opportunity to open CERN’s facilities to the public allowing curious minds to discover groundbreaking technologies, have fun with physics and meet the people who work at the cutting edge of science and technology. This culminated in a big Open Days event hosted by CERN on 14-15 September 2019. On that occasion CMS welcomed more than 8,000 visitors on the experiment site, both underground and on the surface, transforming the LHC Point 5 into cheerful family village.
We will present the variety of activities we offered during the CERN Open Days, that included taking a walk in the cathedral-sized cavern that houses the CMS detector, answering public’s questions on what is it like to work at the CMS experiment and what do we learn from CMS, as well as testing young public’s imagination by building CMS with Kapla wooden blocks and Lego bricks. All this was a truly collaborative effort; around 300 volunteers from various teams worked very hard to make sure that everyone is satisfied and profits the most of this event.
