ORGANISATION EUROPEENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLEAIRE CERN EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH

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1 CERN/3232 Original: English 17 June 2016 ORGANISATION EUROPEENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLEAIRE CERN EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH COUNCIL Hundred-and-seventy-eighth Session Geneva 18 December 2015 OPEN SESSION MINUTES As the Draft Minutes (CERN/3232/Draft, dated 11 May 2016) were approved without amendment at the Hundred-and-eighty-first Session of the Council on 17 June 2016, the attached document can be regarded as the final version.

2 CERN/3232/Draft Original: English 11 May 2016 ORGANISATION EUROPEENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLEAIRE CERN EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH COUNCIL Hundred-and-seventy-eighth Session Geneva 18 December 2015 OPEN SESSION DRAFT MINUTES

3 CERN/3232/Draft TABLE OF CONTENT Section Page LIST OF PARTICIPANTS... i 1. STATUS REPORT ON THE START-UP ACTIVITIES LEAD-LEAD LHC OPERATION HIGHLIGHTS IN STATUS REPORT ON THE LHC EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTING TALKS BY YOUNG SCIENTISTS... 4 ALICE... 4 ATLAS... 4 CMS... 5 TOTEM... 6 LHCF... 7 LHCB REPORT ON THE DECISIONS TAKEN AT RESTRICTED AND CLOSED SESSIONS REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF THE SCIENTIFIC POLICY COMMITTEE REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF ECFA CONFIRMATION OF ACCESS STATUS OF DOCUMENTS OF THE SESSION OTHER BUSINESS... 12

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5 CERN/3232/Draft i LIST OF PARTICIPANTS (Open Session) President: Prof. Agnieszka Zalewska Poland Participants: Ms Miriam Baghdady Austria Prof. Walter Van Doninck Prof. Leandar Litov Prof. Rupert Leitner Mr Ondřej Novák Prof. Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje Mr René Michelsen Dr Pentti Pulkkinen Prof. Ursula Bassler Mr Reynald Pain Prof. Siegfried Bethke Dr Thomas Roth Dr Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph Not represented Prof. Peter Levai Prof. Eliezer Rabinovici Prof. Umberto Dosselli Prof. Sijbrand de Jong Prof. Dr Eric Laenen Dr Bjørn Jacobsen Prof. Eivind Osnes Mr Dariusz Drewniak Mr Wojciech Piatkowski Prof. Gaspar Barreira Prof. Paulo A. Pardal Belgium Bulgaria Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Israel Italy Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal

6 ii CERN/3232/Draft H.E. Mr Fedor Rosocha Prof. Branislav Sitár Mr Fernando Ballestero Prof. Mario Martinez Prof. Barbro Åsman Dr Mats Johnsson Mr Bruno Moor Mr Patrick Pardo Prof. Olivier Schneider Prof. Jon Butterworth Dr Sharon Ellis Slovakia Spain Sweden Switzerland United-Kingdom Candidate for Accession: Dr Florin Buzatu Romania Associate Member State in the Pre-stage to Membership: Mr Dragoslav Lažić Serbia Associate Member States: Observers: Mr Aamar Aftab Qureshi Mr Zafer Alper Mr Antonio Di Giulio Not represented Dr Nikolai Russakovich Prof. Kazunori Hanagaki Mr Yoshiaki Ishida Prof. Katsuo Tokushuku Mr Vladimir Malinkin Prof. Y. Tikhonov Dr Andy Lankford Dr Abid Patwa Pakistan Turkey European Commission India JINR Representatives of Japan Representatives of the Russian Federation Representatives of the USA

7 CERN/3232/Draft iii Also Present: Prof. Halina Abramowicz Ms Charlotte Jamieson Prof. Tatsuya Nakada Chair of ECFA Chair of the Finance Committee Chair of the Scientific Policy Committee CERN Officials: Dr Sergio Bertolucci Dr Frédérick Bordry Dr Fabiola Gianotti Prof. Rolf-Dieter Heuer Mr Sigurd Lettow Dr Rüdiger Voss Director for Research and Computing Director for Accelerators and Technology Director-General Designate Director-General Director for Administration and General Infrastructure Head, International Relations CERN Services: Dr Eva-Maria Gröniger-Voss Ms Lisa Morris Mr John Pym Ms Brigitte Van der Stichelen Legal Counsel Minute-Writers Council Secretariat

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9 CERN/3232/Draft 1 OPEN SESSION The meeting resumed in Open Session at 9.00 a.m. on Friday, 18 December. The PRESIDENT welcomed the Observers: Mr A. Di Giulio of the European Commission, Dr N. Russakovich of JINR, Professor K. Hanagaki, Mr Y. Ishida and Professor K. Tokushuku of Japan, Professor Y. Tikhonov of the Russian Federation, and Professor A. Lankford and Dr A. Patwa of the United States. Apologies had been received from Professor A. Skrinsky of the Russian Federation, Ms I. Bokova and Ms F. Schlegel of UNESCO, and Dr J. Siegrist of the United States. 1. STATUS REPORT ON THE START-UP ACTIVITIES (Item 1 of the Agenda) Dr BORDRY presented a status report 1 on the recent accelerator start-up activities after the first long shutdown (LS1) and the goals for Run 2. The year 2015 had culminated in a successful 25 ns proton-proton physics run at a 13 TeV centre-of-mass energy, with a record of over 2244 bunches per beam, followed by a one-month lead-lead ion run in December. Although the 4.3 fb -1 integrated luminosity delivered during the year was somewhat below the initial projection of 8 to 10 fb -1, essentially due to the four-week delay in the start-up for additional testing of the copper interconnections, an integrated luminosity of over 1 fb -1 had been achieved in the last week of operation alone, which augured well for the start of production-mode operation in The main goals for the year would be to reduce the β* in ATLAS and CMS from 80 cm to 40 cm, and to reach the nominal design luminosity of cm -2 s -1 following a rapid intensity ramp-up. The next LHC performance workshop, to be held in Chamonix from 25 to 29 January 2016, would provide an opportunity to review the steps needed for further increases in energy and intensity towards the ultimate integrated luminosity goals of 100 fb -1 by the end of Run 2 in 2018 and 300 fb -1 by the end of Run 3. In his concluding remarks, he thanked the LHC and injector teams, the international collaborations and the contractors for their work during the year and congratulated them on their many achievements. He further thanked the President of Council, Professor Zalewska, and the Director-General, Professor Heuer, for their continued support, together with the other outgoing members of the Management team: the Director for Administration and General Infrastructure, Mr Lettow, and the Director for Research and Computing, Dr Bertolucci. Applause. 1 See

10 2 CERN/3232/Draft Dr Bordry. The Council took note of the report by the Director for Accelerators and Technology, 2. LEAD-LEAD LHC OPERATION HIGHLIGHTS IN 2015 (Item 2 of the Agenda) The PRESIDENT welcomed Ms M. Schaumann of the BE Department. Ms SCHAUMANN presented the highlights of the successful lead-lead LHC operation at the end of 2015 on behalf of the LHC heavy-ion team 2. The two runs performed over the course of a month, the first a proton-proton reference data run at a beam energy of 2.51 TeV and the second a lead-lead run integrating around 700 µb -1 per experiment, had allowed the peak design luminosity to be exceeded by more than a factor of three at both ATLAS and CMS. ALICE had achieved the maximum luminosity possible prior to its upgrade during LS2, while LHCb had taken part in lead-lead data taking for the first time. The 150 ns bunch spacing allowed by the optimisation of the SPS injection kicker had been one of the key factors in the luminosity evolution. A total beam energy of 1 PeV had been achieved, together with excellent beam availability and an impressive average turnaround time of 5 to 6 hours between dumping the beam and resuming collisions. Underlining the important knowledge acquired from the two runs in terms of performance and quench limits, which would be essential for future upgrades, she thanked the many people from the LHC and the injector teams involved for their contributions to the results achieved. Applause. In reply to a question from Professor NAKADA concerning plans for future upgrades, she explained that 11 Tesla dipole magnets were being developed for the future HL-LHC, which would require an increase in the number of collimators. As the installation of additional collimators in the ring would reduce the space available for the magnets, the current dipole magnets in the collimation area would be replaced by pairs of shorter but more powerful dipole magnets, each measuring 5.5 m compared to the present 15-metre-long magnets. To be able to bend the beam as effectively as the current 8 Tesla magnets, they would have to generate an 11-Tesla magnetic field. Dr BORDRY added that tests of the 11 Tesla technology under development would help to determine how many such magnets would be required for the HL-LHC and at which locations they would be needed. While he was reasonably certain of the need to install them in 2 See

11 CERN/3232/Draft 3 the collimation area at Point 7, he anticipated that they might also be required around ATLAS and CMS, as well as subsequently at ALICE. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL, voicing satisfaction with the successful lead-lead operation above the design luminosity and with the fact that all four of the main LHC experiments had been able to take part in it, said that he wished to congratulate the heavy-ion team on the work accomplished during the year. The Council took note of the presentation by Ms Schaumann. 3. STATUS REPORT ON THE LHC EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTING (Item 3 of the Agenda) Dr BERTOLUCCI presented a status report on the LHC experiments and computing 3, noting that 2015 had been a fruitful year on both fronts. The experiments had coped very well with the exceptional performance of the machine, successfully testing the improvements made during LS1 and demonstrating their readiness to exploit the opportunities of 13 TeV operation during Run 2. Having validated the new online/offline data-taking and analysis process, they had started analysing the considerable amount of 13 TeV data already taken and had published their first results. In addition, preparations for the Phase I upgrades to be implemented during LS2 were proceeding well, while the first steps of the Phase II upgrades for ATLAS and CMS had been approved by the Resources Review Board in October. The forthcoming year-end technical stop would be used to solve a few minor problems in preparation for the restart in March On the computing side, the amount of raw data was increasing every year. In 2015, a total of close to 40 PB of data had been stored on tape, ATLAS and CMS each having transferred some 20 PB of data over the last month. In his concluding remarks, he thanked the Council members, the President, the Director-General and his fellow directors for their support during his seven years as Director for Research and Computing, and extended best wishes to the new Management team that would take up office on 1 January Applause. The Council took note of the report by the Director for Research and Computing, Dr Bertolucci. 3 See

12 4 CERN/3232/Draft 4. TALKS BY YOUNG SCIENTISTS (Item 4 of the Agenda) ALICE The PRESIDENT welcomed Dr R. Preghenella of the ALICE collaboration. Dr PREGHENELLA presented 4 a selection of the ALICE experiment s recent results from LHC Runs 1 and 2, including the highest-precision direct measurement of the difference in mass between nuclei and anti-nuclei using the time-of-flight detector; the first observation of the enhanced production of strange particles in high-multiplicity proton-proton collisions compared to proton-lead and lead-lead collisions, first proposed in 1982 as a signature for the formation of QGP; measurement of the pseudorapidity and transverse momentum dependence of charged particles in the central barrel and measurement of the evolution of the p T spectra with multiplicity, in the framework of studies of the production of charged particles in protonproton collisions at 13 TeV; and measurement of production of charged particles in the central barrel in lead-lead collisions at 5.02 TeV. Applause. In reply to questions from Professor NAKADA concerning the pseudorapidity dependence measurements of charged particles in the central barrel, he explained that the results agreed well with similar measurements performed by the CMS experiment for inelastic events but that the systematic uncertainties were not identical for the two experiments. He further confirmed that the Monte Carlo simulations tuned in 2011 using the PYTHIA6 programme had matched the data more closely than those tuned in 2013 using the PYTHIA8 programme. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL said that he wished to congratulate the ALICE collaboration on the impressive results achieved in The Council took note of the presentation by Dr Preghenella. ATLAS The PRESIDENT welcomed Ms C. Doglioni of the ATLAS collaboration. 4 See

13 CERN/3232/Draft 5 Ms DOGLIONI presented 5 a selection of the 2015 Run 2 physics results of the ATLAS experiment in areas including di-jet mass and angular distributions, the search for new physics in multi-jet events, searches for supersymmetry, the search for di-boson resonances, the search for new resonances decaying to a photon and a jet and to two photons, as well as precision measurements of Standard Model processes at 7 TeV, 8 TeV and 13 TeV during Run 1 and Run 2 and prospects for further discoveries at higher energies with a large increase in the size of the dataset. She also highlighted the excellent performance of all detector components during the year, the addition of a new insertable b-layer detector 3.3 cm from the interaction point, and improvements in the computing model and the trigger system made during LS2. On behalf of the ATLAS collaboration, she thanked the LHC team and the collaborating countries and funding agencies for their continued support. Applause. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL congratulated the ATLAS team on its achievements and on the intriguing indications of possible new physics in The Council took note of the presentation by Ms Doglioni. CMS The PRESIDENT welcomed Ms M. D Alfonso of the CMS collaboration. Ms D ALFONSO presented 6 highlights from the CMS experiment in 2015, a particularly busy year that had included the analysis of the first results from Run 2, the publication of several papers on Run 1 data and preparations for future upgrades. Detector availability in Run 2 so far stood at over 97%, and the improvements made to calorimeter timing and the trigger had allowed the experiment to rise to the challenges of 25-ns running. Following the successful calibration of the detector using cosmic rays, it had been possible in the early stages of Run 2 to rediscover at higher energies many of the known Standard Model particles. The collaboration would henceforth focus on new physics, more specifically the searches for high-mass resonances, dark matter and SUSY-like exotics or models. Applause. In reply to questions from Professor NAKADA, she explained that, as of the start of Run 2, CMS had adopted a multi-fit method, combining multiple paths to isolate collisions of interest from less interesting events. Such an approach had not been required for 50-ns 5 See 6 See

14 6 CERN/3232/Draft operation during Run 1, but at 25 ns it had proven essential in improving the rejection of outof-time pile-up. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL congratulated the CMS team on its achievement in producing a substantial amount of physics results in spite of the cold-box contamination that had affected the experiment in 2015 and wished the collaboration success in resolving the issue during the year-end technical stop. The Council took note of the presentation by Ms D Alfonso. TOTEM The PRESIDENT welcomed Dr M. Berretti of the TOTEM collaboration. Dr BERRETTI presented 7 his report on TOTEM, summarising the experiment s physics programme and giving a brief overview of the apparatus being used during Run 2. He provided further details of some of the experiment s latest results, including preliminary results from the special 13 TeV run of the LHC for TOTEM in October 2015, which had revealed strong potential for the future discovery of glueballs. TOTEM was currently being upgraded with timing detectors, which would allow the study of central diffraction at high luminosities in conjunction with CMS. Applause. In reply to questions from Professor NAKADA, he explained that, even at low luminosity, the new timing information would facilitate the study of the central diffractive processes in a way that had not been possible with a standard tracking variable. For elastic measurements, the co-linearity of the end proton helped considerably in reducing background, but for central diffraction it was essential to be certain that both protons were coming from the same vertex. In reply to a question from the PRESIDENT, he confirmed that the information from CMS would allow TOTEM to operate at higher luminosities and to make lower cross-section measurements in diffraction, opening up the programme to new areas of physics. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL congratulated the TOTEM team on its results, praising the collaboration s work with CMS in particular and wishing it well in its search for glueballs. The Council took note of the presentation by Dr Berretti. 7 See

15 CERN/3232/Draft 7 LHCf The PRESIDENT welcomed Dr L. Bonechi of the LHCf collaboration. Dr BONECHI presented 8 his report on the LHCf experiment, emphasising the link between LHCf and cosmic-ray physics, providing details of the experimental set-up and outlining the experiment s physics programme and publications in recent years. He further presented preliminary results from the dedicated LHCf low-luminosity run in June 2015 and explained the collaboration s interest in a proton-lead run at some point during 2016 or Applause. In reply to a question from Professor NAKADA about the transition at around 2000 GeV shown in the plots on Slide 9, he explained that such a phenomenon was most likely to be due to a detector effect, probably related to the fact that the experiment consisted of two separate towers. In reply to a question from the PRESIDENT, he explained that the proposed cooperation with ATLAS would be mutually beneficial. It would allow LHCf to distinguish between diffractive and non-diffractive events and would also be useful for ATLAS in a number of respects, particularly in terms of the reconstruction of events of interest to the ALFA group using LHCf data. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL observed that the physics carried out by LHCf was an excellent example of the versatility of the LHC beyond the four main experiments and wished the collaboration well for The Council took note of the presentation by Dr Bonechi. LHCb The PRESIDENT welcomed Dr C. Fitzpatrick of the LHCb collaboration. Dr FITZPATRICK presented 9 his report on the 2015 highlights and status of LHCb, providing an overview of the experiment s physics programme, technical details of the detector and further information about the structure of the collaboration, which had recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Data taken during Run 1 had continued to yield surprises, 8 See 9 See

16 8 CERN/3232/Draft in particular the first observation of pentaquarks, announced in July For Run 2, the opportunity to collect larger quantities of data was more significant for LHCb than increased energy levels. The experiment had therefore radically changed its data collection paradigm, moving from offline reconstruction and processing to real-time alignment and calibration coupled with real-time analysis. Run 2 had already yielded interesting results on charm production and J/ψ production, and expansions of the experiment s ion physics and SMOG gas injection programmes were planned for Applause. In reply to questions from Professor BETHKE, he explained that the experiment had a total of 5 petabytes of disk storage available as a buffer for real-time alignment and calibration between the two software triggers, which was more than adequate to allow all the data from each fill to be stored for long enough to be processed before the next fill. The capacity was a fringe benefit of the computing farm s nodes, which were supplied off the shelf with 1.5 terabytes of storage each that was not required for other purposes. The disks in question were mechanical, but a switch to solid-state disks would be unlikely to result in an increase in speed due to the bandwidth limitations of the internal network between the hardware trigger and the nodes. In reply to a question from Professor ABRAMOWICZ on the effect of gas injection on the lifetime of the beam, he noted that the interaction rate was quite low and that the gas was injected only into a separate vacuum for the vertex locator, which meant that it did not pollute the entire beam pipe or affect the other experiments. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL voiced his admiration for the precision of LHCb s results and its innovative approaches to data collection. The Council took note of the presentation by Dr Fitzpatrick. Professor NAKADA, thanking all the speakers for their interesting talks and congratulating the teams involved on the activities presented, stated that the Scientific Policy Committee had heard status reports on the LHC machine, experiments and computing at its meeting on 14 and 15 December. The Committee had congratulated the machine group on the successful commissioning work for the LHC start-up at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, which had led to stable physics data taking with a peak luminosity of 5 x by the end of the 2015 proton run. A total of 4 fb -1 pp collision data had been collected by the ATLAS and CMS experiments each, and a wealth of physics results, extending the validity of the Standard Model to a higher energy scale than obtained by the Run 1 data and demonstrating the advantages of operation at higher energies, had been presented during the LHC seminar on the

17 CERN/3232/Draft 9 afternoon of 15 December. ALICE and LHCb were also publishing results from the 13 TeV data, and all four experiments had taken data with Pb-Pb collisions at 5 TeV per nucleon. The SPC had congratulated everyone who had contributed to those achievements and looked forward to the data taking in 2016, when it was hoped to reduce the β* to 40 cm in order to achieve the nominal luminosity of cm -2 s -1. The SPC had also supported the machine group s decision not to remove the Unidentified Lying Object (ULO) during the technical stop to avoid the risks associated with opening up the magnet, particularly since the object did not appear to be limiting the aperture of the machine. In addition, it had underlined that the crucial clean-up of the CMS magnet s cryogenic circuit, scheduled to be completed during the technical stop, must be conducted with all due care and attention. On the computing side, the SPC had noted with satisfaction the significant software development efforts made to optimise algorithms and to exploit the new CPU architectures, as well as the evolution of the computing models in such a way that the data processing and analysis resource requirements before the HL-LHC upgrade were no longer a concern. However, computing resources for the HL-LHC remained an issue. Ms JAMIESON reported that the Finance Committee had heard impressive talks on the LHC machine, experiments and computing at its meeting on 16 December and had also taken note of the report by the Chair of the Scientific Policy Committee. The Council took note of the reports by Professor Nakada and Ms Jamieson on the recent discussions of LHC matters at the Scientific Policy Committee and the Finance Committee respectively. The PRESIDENT invited the delegations to attend a ceremony for the signing of the protocols to the US-CERN cooperation agreement during the coffee break. The meeting adjourned at a.m. and resumed at a.m. 5. REPORT ON THE DECISIONS TAKEN AT RESTRICTED AND CLOSED SESSIONS (Item 5 of the Agenda) The PRESIDENT reported 10 on the decisions taken at the 177th Restricted and Closed Sessions of the Council on September 2015 and at the 178th Restricted and Closed Sessions on 17 December See

18 10 CERN/3232/Draft The Council took note of the report by the President on the decisions taken at the Restricted and Closed Sessions since the previous Open Council Session in June REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE (Item 6 of the Agenda) Ms JAMIESON reported that, at its meeting on 16 December, the Finance Committee had noted that the Management's dialogue with Member States that were currently experiencing financial difficulties had been quite effective in expediting the payment of their contributions. At the time of the meeting, 93% of the contributions for 2015 had been received. Nevertheless, a request had been made by one delegation for the arrangements regarding penalties for Member States with significant contributions arrears to be clarified. The Management had reported that the cash-flow position was rather tight and that, although short-term loans were not required at present, they might be needed early in 2016 if payments were not forthcoming at the start of the year. In anticipation of such an eventuality, the Management had negotiated low-interest credit lines, in particular with the European Investment Bank. The Committee had also received a report from the Chair of TREF, Mr Dormy, on the discussions in the framework of the 2015 five-yearly review of social and financial conditions. In that context the Forum had heard an extensive presentation by the Head of the Human Resources Department, Ms Catherin, detailing the balanced package of proposals put forward by the Management incorporating no overall adjustments to salaries or stipends but a set of other measures aimed at maintaining the Organization s attractiveness. Those measures included changes to the career structure to enhance transparency and motivation, to streamline processes and to contain costs in the medium and long terms, together with diversity-related measures that would allow CERN to resolve and avoid litigation, provide better support to families and enhance the private/professional life balance of the personnel. The Chair of the Pension Fund Governing Board, Dr Roth, had reported on pensionrelated matters, informing the Committee of the Fund's year-to-date performance of 3.29%, well ahead of the pro rata objective of 2.37%, and of its profit of MCHF, bringing total assets to just over 4 BCHF. The Consulting Actuary, Mr Hurd of Buck Consultants, had presented the Pension Fund's dashboard, noting that the funding ratio had improved from 69.5% to 72.5% since the 2013 actuarial review and that, according to the current projections, it would stand at 98.7% in The next dashboard presentation would be made in June 2016, based on new, best-estimate assumptions elaborated by the actuary in conjunction with the Fund's risk consultant, Ortec, and approved by the Pension Fund Governing Board.

19 CERN/3232/Draft 11 Finally, the Finance Committee had had an interesting discussion of the purchasing procedures for the future HL-LHC civil engineering and construction work and had subsequently approved 24 contract adjudication proposals, all by unanimous vote of the Member States present. The Council took note of the report by the Finance Committee Chair, Ms Jamieson, on matters discussed at the September and December 2015 meetings of the Finance Committee not addressed under other items of the agenda. 7. REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF THE SCIENTIFIC POLICY COMMITTEE (Item 7 of the Agenda) Professor NAKADA presented his report 11 on the matters discussed at the September and December 2015 meetings of the Scientific Policy Committee not addressed under other items of the agenda, and in particular on the interim conclusions of the SPC working group charged with providing a reply to the Council's question on R&D relating to future highenergy frontier machines. The main considerations of the working group, for the time being, were that the European Strategy for Particle Physics still provided a valid guideline for the R&D activities to be pursued and that, in preparation for the next Strategy update, CERN s highest R&D priorities should thus be to establish a Technical Design Report for CLIC and a Conceptual Design Report for the FCC. Muon colliders would start to become an interesting topic if new physics were to emerge in the region of several TeV. In that event, it would be desirable to draw up a rigorous R&D plan, comprising a well-defined timeline, in consultation with European groups and international partners. Finally, the working group had considered that accelerator R&D developments in China (CEPC and SPPC) and Japan (ILC) should be closely monitored. Professor RABINOVICI, expressing appreciation for the work already performed by the SPC in reply to the Council's question, of which he had been the initiator, said that he liked to compare CERN to a ship and the SPC members to its sailors standing high on the crow's nest scrutinising the horizon to pick out the best future course. When he had originally proposed the question to the Council, he had been keenly aware that answering it would be difficult and time-consuming for the Committee, but he remained convinced that such questions needed to be asked and answers found. Forming an opinion and considering even a slight change of course would require bravery and wisdom, and having observed the Committee's work over the past six months, he was gratified by the thoroughness and courage its members had shown in giving a clear and opinionated answer, albeit a preliminary one. The future would tell 11 See

20 12 CERN/3232/Draft whether that answer was correct, but it was clearly the best possible advice that could be given today, based on present knowledge The Council took note of the report by the Chair of the Scientific Policy Committee, Professor Nakada, and of the statement by Professor Rabinovici. 8. REPORT BY THE CHAIR OF ECFA (Item 8 of the Agenda) Professor ABRAMOWICZ reported 12 on the 2015 activities of Plenary and Restricted ECFA and of ICFA. The Council took note of the report by the Chair of ECFA, Professor Abramowicz. 9. CONFIRMATION OF ACCESS STATUS OF DOCUMENTS OF THE SESSION (Item 9 of the Agenda) No documents were submitted. 10. OTHER BUSINESS (Item 10 of the Agenda) - End of the Terms of Office of one Vice-President of Council, two Department Heads, the Head of International Relations and the Head of the Health, Safety and Environmental protection unit The PRESIDENT expressed her appreciation, on the Council's behalf, to Professor W. Van Doninck, who had completed his third one-year term of office as Council Vice- President. She also thanked the outgoing members of the CERN Management, Dr R. Saban, Head of the Engineering Department, Dr L. Mapelli, Head of the Physics Department, Dr R. Voss, Head of International Relations, and Dr R. Trant, Head of the HSE unit. - End of the Terms of Office of the Director-General, the Director for Administration and General Infrastructure, the Director for Research and Computing The PRESIDENT said that, on behalf of the Council, she wished to express her thanks to the outgoing Director-General, Professor Heuer, for his outstanding work in managing the Laboratory over the past seven years, as well as to the outgoing Director for Administration 12 See

21 CERN/3232/Draft 13 and General Infrastructure, Mr S. Lettow, and the outgoing Director for Research and Computing, Dr S. Bertolucci. The Council took note of the statement by the President and warmly thanked the outgoing Director-General, Professor Heuer, for his sterling work in managing the Laboratory over the past seven years, together with the outgoing Director for Administration and General Infrastructure, Mr Lettow, and the outgoing Director for Research and Computing, Dr Bertolucci. - Expressions of appreciation to the administrative services supporting the Council Finally, the PRESIDENT expressed her gratitude to all members of the administrative services supporting the Council's work, namely the Council Secretariat, the Legal Service, the Translation and Minutes service and the interpreters. The DIRECTOR-GENERAL, expressing his own thanks to the Directors, Department Heads, the Council support services and more generally all CERN staff, said that he wished to underline how much he had appreciated the positive interaction he had enjoyed with all members of the Council, the Scientific Policy Committee and the Finance Committee, which had been crucial to the success of the Laboratory during his seven-year term of office. - President of Council handover ceremony The PRESIDENT, handing over the gavel and her office-keys to the Council Presidentelect, Professor S. de Jong, said that she wished her successor every success for the future in his challenging new role. Professor DE JONG, expressing appreciation to the Council for having placed its trust in him, said that he wished to congratulate the outgoing President, Professor Zalewska, on her successful three-year term of office and to thank her for the valuable assistance she had given him during the two months since his election. Applause. The meeting rose at p.m. * * *