It's been about 14 years ago since I last visited CERN. The city of Geneva has appeared a few times on past itineraries, but this was the first time since the "LHC incident" in September 2008 that I visited the CERN Meyrin site. Some things have changed, but many things did not, and it was pretty amazing to find myself walking the same shortcuts through an all-familiar maze of interconnected buildings. While the main motivation for my visit was to discuss our contributions to the construction of CMS's "MIP Timing Detector" (MTD), or rather its Endcap Timing Layer (ETL), it was a great opportunity to attend some of the meetings that took place in the context of the CMS Week and visit "Point 5," the experimental site for the CMS detector to see in-person how the installation efforts in a few years will look like.

It was also a great opportunity to meet old friends (Tapan!) going back to my days as an undergraduate and graduate student at the WA93 and WA98 experiments, respectively.


Unfortunately, the Netherlands lost that same week from Argentina in the quarter finals of the World Cup ...