CERN'S Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ranks among the top scientific endeavors of the decade. Although predictions vary as to precisely what will be observed at this new energy frontier, theorists are in broad agreement that something new will be discovered. The excitement surrounding this scientific opportunity has led to a sharp increase in the number of graduates seeking to pursue research at the LHC for their Ph.D dissertations. Because of the unprecedented scale and complexity of the LHC detectors, working on the commissioning of such detectors provides the students with a highly valuable experience which contributes to their education in ways that simply cannot be duplicated. Moreover, meaningful participation requires a physical presence at CERN. With the imminent turn-on of the LHC, the next few years provide a special window of opportunity. However, the combined effect of sharply increased student interest in the LHC, higher living costs in Geneva and the weakening of the U.S. dollar, has made student support more problematic. To ensure that students will have time at CERN, this proposal comprises a program consisting of about 10 special single-year (non-renewable) travel supplements per year, for three years, awarded competitively, for US CMS graduate students to be resident at CERN during the one-year period of their support.
With regard to broader impact, the recipients will be ?natural ambassadors? in two senses. First, their day-to-day interactions with counterparts from other countries will lead to friendships that will promote mutual understanding in the near term and may lead to future international scientific collaborations. Second, upon their return to the U.S. they will be integrated into US CMS? existing Education and Outreach program, where their relative youth makes them plausible role models for potential scientists of high-school and middle-school age.
On the 4th of July of the year 2012, the CMS collaboration, a group of 3000 scientists, engineers, and technicians working at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of a new particle, whose observed properties were consistent with the highly anticipated Higgs boson. A similar announcement was simultaneously made by the ATLAS collaboration, our chief competitors at CERN. Supporting evidence was made public around the same time by the CDF and D0 collaborations from Fermilab. In the months that followed, additional data was gathered and further analysis was carried out. By early 2013, there was an incontrovertible case that the new particle was indeed the long-sought Higgs. As a result, François Englert and Peter Higgs, whose theories had predicted this particle five decades earlier, were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. The discovery of the Higgs, which is the capstone of the highly successful "standard model" of particle physics, is a tremendous achievement. Even so, many unanswered questions remain and the work to elucidate the nature of the microworld continues at CERN and elsewhere. The experimental campaign that led to the discovery of the Higgs spanned 20 years and involved the efforts of thousands of scientists. A group of graduate students numbering in the hundreds carried out many of the key tasks: assembling, testing, and calibrating detectors; staffing shifts; writing computer code to monitor the operation of the detector as data was being acquired; and analyzing that data to extract the tiny Higgs signal from an enormous background noise. Much of this work could be done by students laboring at their home institutions in the US and elsewhere, but many key tasks could only be accomplished by people resident at CERN. Funds from this grant were used to provide supplemental cost-of-living support that made it possible for 28 graduate students from U.S. universities to spend a year at CERN. These young men and women not only made essential contributions to the experimental program, but also had the privilege of being on the scene as the discovery process unfolded. Some of these students will go on to careers in academic research. Others will pursue careers in industry. Either way, the experience they gained at CERN will strengthen their ability to make important societal contributions that will ultimately strengthen the U.S. economy.
