Steinar Stapnes | 16 May 2013[caption id="attachment_26861" align="alignleft" width="300"] Steinar Stapnes (at that time leading the European Strategy process) announced the launch of the process to update the European strategy for particle physics during an ECFA-EPS special session in Grenoble, France, on 23 July, 2011.Image: LPSC/Tomas Jezo[/caption] The European Strategy for Particle Physics has been submitted to the CERN Council. The goal is final approval in the coming weeks. The significance of the Strategy document is high. It has been drafted by a combination of a scientific preparation group and various appointed representatives of the CERN member states, including also representatives from other countries and/or regions. One important feature of the European process is that from draft to final approval in the Council takes only months, and the Council members/decision represent the governments directly. Secondly – as “global projects” have large cross-regional consequences and this process pre-dates other on-going processes in the US, Japan and other places – it has wide impact also beyond Europe, as a minimum serving as a possible example. The LHC including its luminosity upgrade is a clear and rather obvious priority for the future, but the physics potential of future Linear Colliders is also well recognised in the Strategy statements. The relevant phrases were already quoted by Lyn Evans in his Director Corner in March: For CLIC and higher energy hadron machine than LHC as options for post-LHC projects at CERN, “CERN should undertake design studies for accelerator projects in a global context, with emphasis on proton-proton and electron-positron high-energy frontier machines. These design studies should be coupled to a vigorous accelerator R&D programme, including high-field magnets and high-gradient accelerating structures, in collaboration with national institutes, laboratories and universities worldwide.” For the ILC, “There is a strong scientific case for an electron-positron collider, complementary to the LHC, that can study the properties of the Higgs boson and other particles with unprecedented precision and whose energy can be upgraded. The Technical Design Report of the International Linear Collider (ILC) has been completed with large European participation. The initiative of the Japanese particle physics community to host the ILC in Japan is most welcome, and European groups are eager to participate. Europe looks forward to a proposal from Japan to discuss a possible participation”. Other statements mention the importance of accelerator R&D, detector R&D and discuss CERNs role in the implementation of projects outside the CERN laboratory as well as its continued work with the European Commission (EC) to implement these strategies. Also these statements are relevant for the LC community. What can and should we expect to happen in practice as a result? There are at least three main areas that are affected by this strategy: the CERN budget planning itself, the European Commission (EC) support for projects and activities, and various national funding programmes. The CERN budget planning for 2014 and beyond is underway and it will be important to see these statements reflected in realities. Some key recommendations, in particular turning the LHC luminosity upgrade into a real-construction project over the next decade require significant resources, so the balance is non-trivial and delicate. Equally important, over the coming years, Horizon 2020 projects representing the EC implementation tools will unfold and the R&D efforts mentioned are expected to become priorities – discussed as part the implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics as stipulated in the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Commission and CERN. Finally the national priorities determine in many cases how the community can participate in the these projects and we all need to work hard to turn there priorities into realities also at this level. For the ILC there is an additional clear wish; a proposal from Japan to participate in such a project is seen as the next natural step to achieve a change of gear towards realisation. Being optimistic, we can hope that other regional and national processes will not diverge in a significant way from the result of the European process. If this is the case, we will have reached – largely thanks to a bottom up process - an important consensus that should help the transition from strategies to realities in the coming years. New LHC results in 2015-16 might and will hopefully provide additional guidance but for the time being the directions are relatively clear. We will also be very much helped if the linear collider community can plan and use resources across CLIC and ILC as efficiently as possible, to make the best possible use of our resources. In all areas related to luminosity performance of the machines, detector and physics studies, project planning and implementation studies, there are huge potentials for common efforts. Another feature of the real world and realities is that resources will remain a limitation and determine the speed of our progress.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CERN, CLIC, European Strategy for Particle Physics, ILC
21 March 2013Geneva, 14 March 2013. At the Moriond Conference today, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year. Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, Higgs boson
Barbara Warmbein | 21 November 2012An industrial study commissioned by the Global Design Effort in collaboration with experts from CERN gives a clearer picture of how cryomodules for the ILC could be mass-produced by industry. The study, whose results were recently presented at a meeting between accelerator experts from different labs. A similar study has looked at cavity serial production. One of the scientists leading the cryomodule study, Vittorio Parma from CERN, was the driving force behind the cryostat assembly for 2000 cryomagnets for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider between 2003 and 2008 and thus predestined to lend his experience to the project.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CEA Saclay, CERN, cryomodule, European XFEL, industrialisation, serial production
8 November 2012The original CERN convention, which was drafted nearly 60 years ago, foresaw that the organization should have a role as co-ordinator for European particle physics, as well as operating international accelerator laboratories. Today, this role is more appropriate than ever: the long lead times usually required to prepare and construct facilities and experiments for modern high-energy physics, together with the increased costs for these activities, underlie the need for a general European strategy in the field. So it was natural for CERN Council to initiate the creation of a European Strategy for Particle Physics in June 2005 and to establish dedicated groups for reviewing the scientific status and producing a proposal. They consulted widely with the community, funding agencies and policy makers in preparing the strategy document, which was adopted by Council in July 2006 during a dedicated session in Lisbon.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, European Strategy for Particle Physics
30 August 2012A team at CERN has drawn inspiration from calorimetry methods developed for high-energy physics to create a new positron-emission tomography system for use in medical imaging, which they’ve dubbed AX-PET. With support from European and American laboratories, the project is reaching fruition, as initial tests confirm its promise.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: calorimeter, CERN, photon detector, SiPM, technology transfer
Barry Barish | 5 July 2012The announcements of the most recent results from the search for the Higgs boson at the LHC bring into sharper focus the new physics at the energy frontier and the potential role of the ILC. Although it is still too soon to know what will be uncovered regarding the Higgs mechanism from studies at the LHC, it is worth pointing out the long-range potential for Higgs physics at the ILC. Two examples illustrate how the ILC will be able to shed further light on the phenomena seen at the LHC.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CERN, Higgs, ILC, LHC
Video: CERN | 5 July 2012After all of this week's news, press releases, blog posts, backgrounders and newspaper stories here's more about the Higgs - catchy, rhythmic and full of clever lyrics. If you think you've still not grasped the Higgs mechanism this song will stick in your head! It's "The Particle Physicists' Song" (based on "The Hippopotamus Song" by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann), with lyrics by Danuta Orlowska, performed by the CERN choir in the CERN Control Room in 2010. Enjoy and pass the tune on to your colleagues...
Category: Video of the week | Tagged: CERN, control room, Higgs
Image: CERN | 5 July 2012Surrounded by cameras and showing a variety of emotions – delighted, touched, excited, shy, proud, almost overwhelmed – the central theorists, CERN management and the spokespeople of the experiments get together for a group picture after yesterday's press conference. Front row, left to right: theorist Francois Englert, theorist Peter Higgs, ATLAS spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti, CERN director Steve Myers. Back row, left to right: CERN director Sergio Bertolucci, CERN DG Rolf Heuer, CMS spokesman Joe Incandela, theorist Carl Hagen, theorist Gerald Guralnik. Missing in the picture: Robert Brout and Tom Kibble and the rest of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.
Category: Image of the week | Tagged: ATLAS, CERN, CMS, Higgs
Image: CERN/M. Lapka | 15 March 2012Young researchers analysing real high-energy collisions from the LHC at CERN. From 27 February to 24 March, about 8000 high school students in 31 countries come to one of about 120 nearby universities or research centres for one day in order to unravel the mysteries of particle physics. Lectures from active scientists give insight in topics and methods of basic research at the fundaments of matter and forces, enabling the students to perform measurements on real data from particle physics experiments themselves. At the end of each day, as in an international research collaboration, the participants join in a video conference for discussion and combination of their results. View more photos from CERN | Read more about the masterclasses in ILC NewsLine
Category: Image of the week | Tagged: CERN, education, school
Wilhelm Bialowons (DESY), John Osborne (CERN) and Masanobu Miyahara (KEK) | 1 March 2012Ten members from the Japanese Society for Civil Engineering’s committee for civil works for future ILC facilities came to Europe in February to look at current civil engineering projects like CERN’s LINAC4 and the European XFEL in Hamburg and to discuss administrative challenges. By the end of March next year, the committee will publish draft guidelines on civil solutions for a potential ILC in Japan.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CERN, civil engineering, DESY, Japan, XFEL
