Project

LHC Experiments; CMS; LHCb; Standard Model; ATLAS; Supersymmetry; Higgs Boson; Heavy Flavour; CP Violation; New Physics

Lead
SNF-FLARE Beitrag zu den jährlichen Kosten für Unterhalt und Betrieb jener grossen Experimente am Large Hadron Collider (LHC) des CERN, welche eine Schweizer Beteiligung haben, nämlich ATLAS, CMS und LHCb.
Lay summary
Dieser SNF-FLARE Grant deckt die jährlichen Kosten für Unterhalt und Betrieb jener grossen Experimente am Large Hadron Collider (LHC) des CERN, welche eine Schweizer Beteiligung haben, nämlich ATLAS, CMS und LHCb. Die Beiträge werden im wesentlichen proportional zur Anzahl Wissenschaftler relativ zur gesamten Kollaboration berechnet, von einer eigenen Revisionsgruppe überprüft und schliesslich jährlich vom sogenannten CERN Resources Review Board abgesegnet.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 28.02.2017

Number	Title	Start	Funding scheme

This FLARE proposal aims at covering the 2017-2020 Swiss share of the maintenance and operations (M&O) costs for the experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As a joint request from all Swiss groups active at LHC, it is coordinated by CHIPP (Swiss Institute of Particle Physics) since 2006. It summarizes the Swiss contributions to the LHC detectors, explains CERN's concept of M&O as defined in Memoranda of Understanding, and gives an overview of the costs that Switzerland is expected to cover in the years 2017 - 2020. While the 2017 numbers are based on the decisions of the LHC Resource Review Boards (RRB) in October 2016, the request for the later years is based on extrapolations from the 2017 values.Starting in the mid-nineties, the world-wide particle physics community has designed and developed four major experiments to operate at the LHC. Through the Universities of Bern, Geneva and Zurich, as well as EPFL, ETH Zurich and PSI, Switzerland significantly contributed to three of them: ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. Constructed with participation of industry, the detectors efficiently recorded data during the first LHC physics run from November 2009 to February 2013 at proton-proton collision energies up to 8 TeV. The highlight of this first run was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. A second run started in mid 2015 at higher energy (13 TeV). By November 2016, a very significant amount of data, corresponding to 41/fb, has been delivered at this energy. These and much more anticipated future data will be scrutinized in order to discover new Physics phenomena through direct observations and/or through precision measurements of Standard Model processes. Besides very significant contributions in terms of design, construction, commissioning, operations and management of the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments, the Swiss LHC community has also played leading roles in the analyses of these data.As far as manpower involvement is concerned, the situation on 1 October 2016 is as follows: the number of PhD physicists from Swiss institutions working for the LHC collaborations amounted to 24 for ATLAS, 36 for CMS and 26 for LHCb. In addition, 19 PhD students from Swiss universities were involved in ATLAS, 20 in CMS, 19 in LHCb, and 10 in LHC accelerator physics in collaboration with the CERN accelerator groups. Finally, the involvement of the students in the LHC experiments from 1996 to October 2016 led to a total of 154 master theses and 152 doctoral theses completed in connection with the development and construction of the LHC detectors as well as with the data analysis. In the field of LHC accelerator physics, 26 PhD theses were completed up to October 2016.CERN in its role as the host laboratory of the LHC accelerator supports the experiments by taking over the cost for safety, radiation protection, and house-keeping (in the largest sense). All the other maintenance and operations costs have to be covered by the funding agencies and institutes involved in the experiments. General support items like the daily running and maintenance expenses (cooling system, general technical support, computing etc.) are charged to all collaborating institutes in proportion to their group size, whereas the costs for maintenance and operation of the components developed and delivered by a given institute are charged to that institute. In addition, each institute has to provide the necessary scientific and technical manpower to operate and maintain the components they delivered. The sharing rules for each experiment have been defined in a Memorandum of Understanding for Maintenance and Operation between each national funding agency and CERN. The budgets approved by CERN’s Resource Review Boards in October 2016 imply a mandatory total Swiss contribution for 2017 of 914.7 kCHF, distributed over the three detectors with Swiss participation as follows: 261.0 kCHF for ATLAS, 441.6 kCHF for CMS, and 212.1 kCHF for LHCb. Based on these numbers and on the extrapolations provided by the experimental collaborations, the costs for the years 2018-2020 are extrapolated to a total amount of 2789.5 kCHF, with similar sharing among the experiments as in 2017.