TA7-Transnational Access to CERN

CERN is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is located by the Swiss-French border near Geneva and is funded by 22 member states. The lab has 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosts about 18,000 world-wide users per year. CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators, computing facilities, and other infrastructure needed for physics research at the highest-energies ever reached. CERN provides unique infrastructure and equipment not available anywhere else in the world. More than half of the WPs of this proposal are based on CERN scientific facilities, in particular:

1. 4 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb) in the multi-TeV energy regime, and 2 fixed-target experiments (COMPASS at SPS, Fixed-Target at LHC) in the tens and hundreds of GeV center-of-mass energies; will carry out fundamental strong interaction measurements using proton and nuclear collisions;
2. Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) test-beam lines (with hadron and lepton beams), plus the IRRAD & GIF++ irradiation facilities, will be used for detector tests and qualification. Services currently offered by the infrastructure: Apart from the best accelerators, collider and fixed-target experiments, and computing facilities currently available in the world, CERN offers its 18,000 world-wide users, all associated ancillary infrastructure (office space, computer networks, electricity, water-cooling, gases, data acquisition, cabling, electronics,…), technical support (safety, radiation protection, computing,...), plus general services (users office, 3 onsite hostels, 3 cafeterias, Swiss and French banks and post offices, as well as a scientific information service with a large library).

Recent Scientific Highlights: The scientific work carried out at CERN has been awarded so far with 3 Nobel Prizes in Physics (1984 for the discovery of the W,Z gauge bosons; 1992 for the development of gas-based detectors; and 2013 for the discovery of the Higgs boson). In addition, the world-wide-web was invented at the lab. All these highlights testify the outstanding worldwide flagship role of CERN in science.