A travel to the past to plan the future
In the week of March 31 – April 4, 2014, the CMS collaboration met at Karlsruhe Institute für Technologie, KIT.
With the goal of expanding the physics reach of its experiments, the Large Hadron Collider in its Phase 2 will be upgraded to reach an instantaneous luminosity that is an order of magnitude higher than what will be achieved in the upcoming runs from 2015 onwards. In order to exploit the full power of the accelerator and to survive the hostile high radiation environment as well as to meet the challenge of reconstructing the more than 100 interactions that will occur at each bunch crossing, the detectors at the LHC need to undergo an extensive upgrade programme. At this collaboration meeting in Karlsruhe, which was organised by long-term CMS member Institute for Experimental Particle Physics (ETP), 264 experts from the CMS collaboration from 80 institutes all over the world congregated to exchange ideas and to plan the ambitious upgrade of the detector.
The five day conference was focused on the preparation of a Technical Proposal to be submitted to the LHCC at its September session. With 130 presentations in plenary and parallel sessions, accompanied by eight management meetings, the CMS week provided a unique opportunity to review the motivations for the proposed upgrades and to consolidate the organization of the R&D programs. The engagement of the collaboration has recently escalated and tremendous progress was reported, demonstrating all the strength of the CMS upgrade program to fully exploit the HL-LHC in its most challenging physics potential. The new light Tracker, with selective read-out at 40 MHz for the purpose of enabling a hardware trigger, and the extension of coverage in the forward region, in conjunction with a high resolution and fine granularity endcap calorimetry, in order to discern Vector Boson Fusion or Scattering processes, are among the major innovations foreseen for the future detector. Many new ideas to provide enhanced background reductions, mitigate the effect of pile-up and improvements in the acceptance to various physics signals were also discussed.
To take a break from these intense discussions and the long meeting days, the collaboration took a trip into the past by riding on a 90 year-old steam train into the Black Forest. 30 km south of Karlsruhe, the small spa town of Bad Herrenalb (home town of the organiser of the CMS Week, Thomas Muller) welcomed the visitors with a traditional Schwarzwaldabend. Accompanied by regional food, the participants enjoyed presentations by the local Hornblowers and traditional dancers. Another highlight of this evening was the award of a CMS model that was laser-engraved into a crystal to Simon Weingarten from RWTH Aachen for the best poster presented at the meeting.
Many more pictures on the ETP-Website.
"Introduction of the KIT Center for Elementary Particles and Astroparticle Physics"
"Neutrinos on the scale of KATRIN"
"The discovery of the Higgs particle or how particles get their mass"
"How elementary particle physics algorithms can save tens of millions"
