Now that 2009 has begun, CERN has a new management team and a new Director General, Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Dr. Heuer is a former spokesperson for the OPAL collaboration at CERN and was most recently the Research Director for particle and astroparticle physics at the DESY in Hamburg, Germany. While working on my talks for next week’s giant annual LBNL ATLAS group meeting in Berkeley, I ran across his first message to the CERN community. This is my favorite part:
Our top priority for this year is providing data to the LHC experiments. After the spectacular success of the LHC’s first beam, and the bitter disappointment of the malfunction barely nine days later, we have emerged stronger. As an outsider, but also a former CERN staff member, it was most gratifying to see that the Organization and its staff has lost none of its determination, none of its creativity and none of its pragmatism. It is remarkable how quickly our engineers have got to grips with the problem, and given us a roadmap to restart. We now understand what went wrong, and we know how to fix it. The timetable for repairs published at the end of 2008 is an aggressive one, and we’ll do our best to keep to it. However, if the work takes longer to accomplish, we will not rush. I will be keeping you all up to date with progress on a regular basis as we go through to the restart and physics later this year.
