FAPESP signs cooperation agreement with CERN

Partnership strengthens support for researchers from the state of São Paulo to participate in activities developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

By Elton Alisson  |  Agência FAPESP – FAPESP has signed a cooperation agreement with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, in its official French acronym).

The agreement strengthens support for researchers and graduate students from universities and research institutions in the state of São Paulo to participate in ongoing and future activities at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, located in Meyrin, Geneva, on the border between Switzerland and France.

“The participation of researchers from São Paulo at CERN was done through individual projects submitted to FAPESP. Through the agreement, the Foundation becomes the direct interlocutor. This takes the Foundation to another level in its relationship with CERN, which becomes more institutional, and broadens the scope of opportunities for the scientific community in the state of São Paulo to participate in collaborative projects using the observatory’s fantastic research infrastructure,” says Marcio de Castro, scientific director of FAPESP.

Salvatore Mele, senior advisor for international relations at CERN, says the agreement represents an important step in the integration of the Brazilian research system into CERN, made possible by Brazil’s recent accession as an associate member state of the research center – the first in the Americas.

“The first steps in implementing this agreement [with FAPESP] are already extremely positive in terms of sharing the maintenance and operating costs of the research infrastructure located at CERN, which is used by the community of researchers from the state of São Paulo in specific experiments conducted at the LHC [Large Hadron Collider],” Mele celebrates in a statement to Agência FAPESP.

“We’ve also had excellent conversations about the exciting technological upgrades underway and planned for the next decade through which the LHC detectors will meet the growing physical potential of this emblematic instrument,” he says.

The LHC is recognized as the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometer-long circular underground tunnel in which particle beams travel at enormous speeds until they collide with each other. During these collisions, the particles react and produce new particles that travel through the experiments afterward. Four detectors monitor the results: ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), the two largest, and ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) and LHCb. Scientists from around the world analyze the obtained data in search of new particles and explanations for some of the greatest mysteries in physics, such as the composition of dark matter (read more at agencia.fapesp.br/55456). 

Participation from São Paulo

Through projects supported by FAPESP, researchers affiliated with universities and research institutions in the state of São Paulo participate in the ATLAS, ALICE, and CMS collaborations.

The CMS project aims to detect and measure subparticles released during collisions. CMS was one of the collaborations responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012, alongside ATLAS.

At the Center for Scientific Computing of São Paulo State University (UNESP), located on the Barra Funda campus, a team of professors, researchers, and technicians works on developing and storing CMS data. The activities are carried out by the São Paulo Research and Analysis Center (SPRACE), created in 2003 with support from FAPESP. 

Through SPRACE, Brazilian researchers operate a processing network and participate in the analysis of data produced by CMS.

The SPRACE computer cluster is also part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).

The WLCG connects 100,000 processors in 34 countries, including Brazil, that transfer data at extremely high speeds.

Through a project supported by FAPESP, a group of researchers from the Engineering School of the University of São Paulo (POLI-USP) developed a chip called SAMPA, which was installed in the ALICE detection system in 2020.

“The participation of São Paulo research institutions in major high-energy physics collaborations over the last few years, largely funded by FAPESP, has yielded important results for Brazilian science, such as the development of the SAMPA chip itself – a high-tech product now used in several similar experiments around the world – as well as the study of fundamental aspects of nature, such as the origin of particle mass,” Marcelo Gameiro Munhoz, a professor at USP’s Physics Institute and one of the project participants, told Agência FAPESP.

The researcher coordinates a project funded by FAPESP that will enable the São Paulo research community to participate in the ALICE and ATLAS experiments, as well as in DRD1 and DRD3 collaborations for research and development in nuclear instrumentation at CERN, over the next five years. The project’s objectives include researching and developing MPGDs (micropattern gaseous detectors) and ultra-fast silicon gas detector instrumentation.

“The project proposal is to enable meaningful participation in the design, construction, and operation of new detector systems in the ALICE and ATLAS collaborations, as well as to contribute to strategically reducing the country’s dependence on cutting-edge technology for radiation detection and signal processing,” Munhoz explains.
  
Launched in 2010, ALICE was designed to study the physics of interactions that occur at extreme energy densities. These interactions result in the formation of a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, which is believed to have composed the universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

By studying the particles produced in nuclear collisions, scientists can infer the properties and behavior of matter under extreme conditions, as well as how it evolved during the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

“The agreement not only institutionalizes FAPESP’s relationship with CERN, but also opens the door for the design and management of future collaborative projects to be better planned,” says Luiz Vitor de Souza Filho, general coordinator of Strategic Programs and Infrastructure at FAPESP.