The surge of interest was anticipated; Tiziano Camporesi, a spokesperson for the LHC's CMS
experiment, told
Nature just after the webcast announcement that he expected to see hundreds of preprints in the
next two weeks.
The
next person to approach really depends on the
nature of the problem (technical, methodological, personal, logistical) and the severity of the problem (threatens a grade in a class, an
experiment, a thesis, a career opportunity, the health of the student, the life of the student).