Atsuto Suzuki, left, director-general for KEK in Japan, came to CERN on 2 July. He is seen here in the cavern of the ATLAS experiment with Shuji Tanaka from KEK, centre, and ATLAS spokesperson, Peter Jenni. His visit also included a tour of the LHC tunnel, the CLIC facility, the CERN Control Centre and the Computing Centre, followed by a meeting with Japanese physicists.
On 23 July, the Hellenic Republic vice-minister, minister of development, Giannis Papathanasiou, right, visited CERN. He toured the ATLAS cavern and the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST), where he is seen with the general secretary for research and technology, Giannis Tsoukalas, left, and CAST spokesperson, Konstantin Zioutas, centre.
Samuel Aronson, director of the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), left, and BNL Physics department chair, Thomas Ludlam, centre, came to CERN on 24 September. They were given a tour of the ATLAS experiment by spokesperson, Peter Jenni (right), and also saw the LHC tunnel, the ALICE experiment and the CLIC facility.
Minister of information and communications, Lyonpo Leki Dorji, left, from the Kingdom of Bhutan, shakes hands with CERN's director-general, Robert Aymar, in front of a montage of the LHC tunnel on his visit to CERN on 18 October. After signing the guest book he toured the real location and visited the ATLAS experiment.
Israeli minister of science, culture and sport, Galeb Majadle, visited CERN on 26 July, and toured the ATLAS muon chamber assembly hall, where he installed the final thin-gap muon chambers for the big muon detector wheel. He also visited the ATLAS experimental cavern, the LHC tunnel and the Computing Centre. The day ended with a meeting with Herwig Schopper, former director-general of CERN and chair of the SESAME council, and Hafeez Hoorani, SESAME's chief scientific officer, regarding the project in Jordan for a synchrotron light source.
On 12 October, Horst Stöcker, right, who has recently taken over as scientific managing director of GSI (see "Stöcker succeeds Henning at GSI"), visited CERN. He toured the ISOLDE facility and the Antiproton Decelerator, and met with his counterpart at CERN, director-general Robert Aymar, left.