Date: 2009-04-16 Category: Interviews

Dr Lyn Evans, LHC Project Leader, CERN: The ITWales Interview

By Sali Earls

On 10 September 2008, the first proton beam was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider LHC. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, its launch marked a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.

Sali Earls spoke to the man behind the colossal science project, Aberdare-born Dr Lyn Evans, LHC Project Leader at CERN, a former student and an Honorary Fellow of Swansea University, to find out more about the LHC project, his successful career in Science, and his thoughts on technological developments in the digital age.

What first inspired you to study at Swansea University?
I was always interested in Science, but I went to Swansea to study Chemistry - the department had a good reputation. In my first year I also did Physics, and found I was more interested in, and adapted well to it - I think it was easier for me.

Did you think about the opportunities that your degree would offer you, or did you keep an open mind about your career?
Like most students, I think you have an open mind, you havent got a clue where its going to take you - the "random walk of life" I call it!

At what point did you think your studies might open up some doors for you?
I didnt really think at all. I did the first degree, had a good enough degree to go on and do a PhD, and my PhD supervisor had links with CERN. That’s how I got to know about CERN. All I can say is that the one thing I didnt want to do is start again at a later date - I wanted to finish all my education.

So working with your PhD supervisor and first engaging with CERN, what projects were you involved with?
I arrived in October 1969 - so that would be 40 years ago - I was a CERN fellow, which is a one year contract, renewable for two. Thats when I learned about Particle Accelerators, which is not the kind of thing you are normally trained on at University. Since then I have worked on all the big projects of CERN, all the way from 1970 to now. This the LHC is my last project.

What impact did the development of the World Wide Web have on the research activities at CERN, and your own research?
Well, the web is an essential tool. The way CERN works is that we have a relatively small staff here responsible for running and building accelerators, but our users are all over the world.

At the time of the Large Electron Positron Collider in 1989 it became obvious that a much more powerful tool than email was needed to communicate the sophisticated material all over the world, and thats why Tim Berners-Lee invented the web.

Now I would say that CERN has changed society by that invention, and of course we use it everyday.

Would the LHC project have been a viable proposition without the development of the Web?
I cant say that the LHC wouldnt have been built without the web, but its there and its an absolutely essential tool, not only for its original purpose, which was collaborating between laboratories, but also communicating right across the project.

Obviously weve had 24 hour news media around for a while, but I think the immediacy of the web has probably taken everyone by surprise, the fact that when something happens, suddenly everyone knows about it at the same time
There is a downside to that - Berners-Lee himself has commented on this some time ago and I certainly agree. All this rubbish about destroying the Universe with black holes, etc. I think that when the web is badly used, it is like a noise amplifier especially if you have people who dont know what theyre talking about.

The black hole story was probably good for us in that it created so much interest in CERN. But here’s another example - theres a measles epidemic in Switzerland at the moment, because mothers are not vaccinating their babies due to the confusion caused by the internet noise and controversy about the measles vaccination. Things like that, totally uninformed opinion from people without the scientific education to evaluate it properly.

I think thats the downside of the web and I don’t know how to control that.

In your lecture you referred to the "Grid". Why is this development important to the LHC project?
Well because the web is totally insufficient for the next step now. The amount of data coming out of the LHC is immense. I mean, petabytes of information. So something more sophisticated needed to be developed for this data, which is generated at CERN, to be accessed and used all over the world.

It’s called the "Grid" because of the analogy with the electricity grid, you plug into the electricity grid and you dont care where the electricity is coming from. Thats the same for the Grid, it is structured in such a way that somebody can be sitting in his office at a university in Bombay, for instance, and pull up LHC data and process it without knowing where it is being stored.

This is the next big step for Particle Physics. I think that we can develop these kinds of things, first of all because we need them and we are a computer literate society, and because weve got this huge distributive base all over the world. Other disciplines are not necessarily computer literate but they have also realised that they need this kind of thing. So the Grid is getting lots of interest and is being used in other fields like meterology, medicine, biology, etc. It’s really taking off now, in specialised areas.

Are you confident that the necessary repairs to the LHC will be successful and when do you hope to restart the Collider?
We had an electrical short in one part, so in itself it would not be a big deal but in the LHC everything’s a big deal! So yes the problem is taking us some time to resolve because getting into the LHC isn’t easy, youve got to warm the whole thing up.

So we are proceeding according to our plan and we should be up and running again mid-September, which is basically one year after the first time.

I would imagine there is very limited testing that can be done prior to you initially switching it on?
Yes and of course, we have got to be absolutely sure that we havent got a lurking problem anywhere else. So I think theres going to be a lot of control before we start up again. Do you remember the Hubble? That had a problem in the beginning. But when it was fixed it was an absolutely brilliant output of scientific information, and its going to be the same for the LHC!

Is there data available from the initial LHC activity that can be processed?
It’s taken about a month to bring the machine on and get it up to high energy, so were looking at mid-October when we get the first data out.

What practical outcomes would you hope for from the project, and how long will it be before the public can benefit from the outcomes?
Good question. Well we are here to do fundamental science, we are not here to generate practical outcomes, that falls out by itself. Like the web, as an example, and maybe the Grid. Maybe the advanced superconductors that we have developed for LHC? Maybe the cooling of the machine in Super Fluid Helium is a big step forward - who knows? I honestly could not - I was in the CERN management at the time the web first started to be used and I did not predict that it would be of such monumental importance.

Would you say that it’s up to academics and businesses to look at the outputs and see what they can do with them?
It’s up to us to make sure that they know about the things we’ve developed. For instance we’ve had to develop a special coating on the vacuum chamber of the LHC, which actually acts as a vacuum pump, so that the pipe is its own pump. We’ve made it known to industry and theres been a lot of interest in producing our trial vacuum, in all sorts of places. Solar energy, for instance, needs a dry vacuum or a good vacuum. So you just dont know. All you have to do is make sure it is known, and then others have got to come and pick it up. Its not up to us, but we do have a technology transfer unit that actually does that.

With declining numbers of students studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths STEM subjects, what impact will this have on next generation scientific and technology innovation?
Well, I think it’s a big worry, I think the UK government has already expressed that worry, and it’s the same thing all over Europe and certainly in the United States as well. Of course we don’t see the impact today, because these are in school - we’ll see it in ten to twenty years time. Not everybody can be a research scientist, but in this industry we need scientists, they certainly have expressed that.

We also need a scientifically educated population that can, for example, have an informed opinion about climate change, or nuclear reactors, or whether your baby should be vaccinated against measles.

I think we need to improve our standard of scientific education on all fronts. And actually, I have been invited to something I never knew existed, Engineering Education Scheme Wales - and I am giving a talk to them in Newport in a few weeks time, where they catch these youngsters in school and pair them up with companies to do little projects, and try and get students interested in science early enough. So well all do what we can to help there.

Is there anything you can think of that you could do to encourage more kids consider science?
Well, I hope that a big high-profile project like LHC will show students that science is exciting - although sometimes too exciting!!

Is there one piece of technology that Lyn Evans cannot live without and is there also a technology that he cannot live with?
Well I could certainly live without the mobile phone, but I can’t live without my computer, that’s for sure! I mean, I survive on email and the web.

What I really could live without is, these little computer games that I see all these kids spending all their lives playing, that scares me - Im trying to make sure my granddaughter doesnt get one!

About the LHC
The LHC measures 27km in circumference, in a tunnel that lies 50-175m below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics.

The LHC is expected to collide beams of protons at the unprecedented energy of 14 Tera electron-Volts - creating conditions that existed very soon after the Big Bang. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories, at a cost of 4.4 billion.

The Large Hadron Collider will produce roughly 15 petabytes 15 million gigabytes of data annually enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year! In order to access and analyse the data, CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the LHC Computing Grid LCG.

On 19 September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets, however, the LHC is scheduled to be fully operational again in September 2009.

Send a comment about this article to editor@itwales.com