Dr. Verena Kain is NOT the LHC terrorist - whew!

A little over a year ago, I wrote two posts about the Large Hadron Collider that will shoot things really really fast and smash them. You'd think that this was a guy thing, but as I noted in the post, one of the people associated with LHC at the time was Dr. Verena Kain.

I haven't really kept up with the LHC in general or Dr. Kain in particular, but I did learn that one person is no longer working on the LHC project.

Police has arrested a 32-yo physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, linking him to an Al Qaeda terrorist group....

According to French newspaper Le Figaro, judicial sources point that the man—who has been working as a particle physics contractor since 2003—has links to Al Qaeda groups in the Islamic Maghreb. Le Figaro said that he had suggested terrorist targets in French soil.

Meanwhile, the non-terrorist portion of the LHC project continues to...have meetings.

LHC-Beam Commissioning Working Group

Notes from the meeting held on
22 September 2009

Present: Maria Carmen Alabau, Gianluigi Arduini, Ralph Assmann, Roger Bailey, Tobias Bär, Oliver Brüning, Helmut Burkhardt, Octavio Dominguez, Kajetan Fuchsberger, Rossano Giachino, Brennan Goddard, Eugenia Hatziangeli, Hitomi Ikeda, Delphine Jacquet, Lars Jensen, Verena Kain, Mike Lamont (chair), Malika Meddahi, Gabriel Mueller, Mario Pereira, Laurette Ponce, Bruno
Puccio, Stefan Roesler, Jan Uythoven, Walter Venturini Delsolaro, Jorg Wenninger, Simon White, Frank Zimmermann.

Excused: Reyes Alemany, Massimiliano Ferro-Luzzi.

But the meeting topics certainly go over my head:

To note from Werner Herr presentation (slides):
β*= 2 m with crossing angle off;
β*= 3 m with crossing angle on;
Alice and LHCb spectrometers will be at full field at 3.5 TeV;
With crossing angle: only one polarity of LHCb spectrometer possible (for any β*).

I'll take their word for it.