The Centre welcomed Dr Stephen Myers OBE FREng of CERN, Geneva, Switzerland to Cranfield University on 8 April who presented a prestige lecture The Engineering Needs for Particle Physics and the CERN Large Hadron Colloder (LHC).
Today’s particle accelerators and detectors are among the most complicated and expensive scientific instruments ever built by mankind, and they exploit almost every aspect of today’s cutting edge engineering technologies. In many cases accelerator needs have been the driving force behind these new technologies; necessity being the mother of invention. The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most recent and most powerful of these devices.
Dr Myers is Head of Medical Applications at CERN, and former Director of Accelerators and Technology. The lecture provided the audience with an overview of some of the engineering requirements for construction and operation of modern day accelerators with particular reference to the LHC. A short description of the steps to increase the performance of the LHC which allowed sufficient data to be accumulated for the discovery of the Higg’s boson was also given.
The lecture concluded with some details of the medical applications resulting from the CERN engineering technologies.
The event was well attended with 160 delegates registered from across academia and industry, ranging from young learners to retired engineers.
