ALICE & ATLAS

Infrastructure: LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
Project title: Alice & Atlas
Main applicant: Bengt Lund-Jensen, KTH
Fellow applicant: Richard Brenner, Division of High Energy Physics
Funder: Research infrastructures of national interest from the Swedish Research Council

The physics exploitation of the ATLAS and ALICE experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has yielded important physics results, notably the discovery of the Higgs boson, the study of unexpected behaviours in proton lead collisions and new stringent limits on dark matter particles. The LHC accelerator and its experiments with their planned upgrades will continue to be the world leading laboratory for experimental particle and heavy ion physics for the coming 20 years.

The Swedish ALICE and ATLAS research groups at KTH, Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala University have a significant impact on these large international collaborations and have made important contributions to its construction: the Silicon tracker (SCT), Transition radiation tracker (TRT) and the calorimeters (Liquid argon and TileCal) as well as the trigger system in ATLAS and the ALICE Time Projection Chamber (TPC). These experimental infrastructures are operated by the physicists of the collaborations. Each research group is obliged to take on purely operational work as shifts, expert tasks or maintenance. This funding request concerns the cost for travel to CERN to fulfil the operation task obligations of the groups towards the experiments, costs for M&O and data handling costs all in order to maintain access to the ALICE and ATLAS data. We also apply for continued support of the CERN summer and technical student programmes for Swedish students.