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
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
11 October 2012The third issue of Accelerating News, a quarterly online publication for the accelerator community in Europe and beyond, looks towards the future: after the LHC as the world's first Higgs production place, what could a real factory look like? What's the plan for neutrinos? Written by the experts, the newsletter gives a broad overview.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: accelerator R&D, CLIC, EuCARD, European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, ILC
Nick Walker | 27 September 2012GDE Project Manager Nick Walker reports from a focused, positive and lively meeting in Cracow and the impact the discussions can have on the ILC. Would a staged approach - starting at 250 GeV to make the ILC a Higgs factory and ramping up to 500 GeV later - make for a cheaper machine? Where are the potential savings, and how long would it take to build an ILC Higgs factory?
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost, European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, Technical Design Report
Barbara Warmbein | 27 September 2012Some 500 particle physicists from Europe and beyond met in Cracow, Poland, in September to kick-start the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, an initiative by the CERN Council that sets the European pace for global planning and cooperation on future projects in particle physics around the world. With the recent discovery of the Higgs-like particle at the LHC, a Higgs factory is high up on the wish list.
Category: Feature | Tagged: European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, Japan, staged approach
Barry Barish | 6 September 2012The particle physics communities worldwide are undertaking strategic planning processes that will set out the course of the field for the coming years. Recent science results, such as the discovery of the Higgs-like particle and the measurement of a relatively large value of theta13, open up exciting future possibilities. In Europe, the process of developing an update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is under way. The next major step will be an open symposium in Krakow, Poland, from 10 to 12 September, for which a set of linear-collider input documents has been submitted.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, European Strategy for Particle Physics, future, Higgs, ILC
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 16 February 2012The international community of theorists and experimentalists working on ILC and CLIC is convinced of the strong physics case for a generic linear collider. More than one hundred of them gathered at DESY last week for three days of intense discussions and review of the different physics scenarios. Two papers are now under way and will be finalised by this summer. In the meantime the input from the whole particle physics community will be very welcome.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, DESY, European Strategy for Particle Physics, lc forum, physics case
