It has been a wonderful year for CMS. We are privileged to be on this great experiment at such a historic time. The public have never been more interested in our field and the excitement is building as we prepare for Run 2 in 2015. We have both wonderful stories to recount to our children and grandchildren and a bright future ahead of us.
We are keen to hear from you. Please contact us at any time at cms-cbchairteam@cern.ch, or by stopping by the CB Office: 40-2-B28. On Skype we are ian.shipsey, claudia-elisabeth.wulz and jorgen.dhondt

Draft minutes of the last CB meeting at CERN (October 25) are here

Selected key issues passed at the CB meeting at the October CMS Upgrade Week

• The start date for the Spokesperson, the CB Chair, and the L1 and L2 positions will be September 1 instead of January 1. A transition plan from the old date to the new date is to be worked out.
• Ischia Island, Naples, was chosen as the venue for the 2015 CMS Week outside CERN.
• The list of journals in which CMS publishes will stay unchanged.
• PhD theses posted on arXiv.org will follow the same approval procedure as publications in refereed journals.
• Acknowledgments of PAS will be posted on CDS as metadata attached to the CDS record.
• Approval of Didier Contardo as 2014-2015 Upgrade Project Leader and Jeremy Mans, Lucia Silvestris as deputies
• Approval of Arnd Meyer as 2014-2015 Conference Committee Chair, and Vincenzo Chiochia and Sung-Won Lee as members
• Approval of Greg Landsberg as 2014-2015 deputy Publications Committee Chair
• Approval of Peter Elmer as 2014 deputy Offline Coordinator
• Approval of Maurizio Pierini as 2014 deputy PPD Coordinator, and Migual Ojeda-Sandonis as 2014-2015 DQM convenor in PPD
• Approval of Juan Alcaraz as 2014-2015 EXO PAG convenor
• Renewal of Monica Vazquez Acosta as TAU POG convenor in 2014
• Renewal of Pawel de Barbaro as 2014-2015 HCAL Subsystem Manager
• Renewal of Jay Hauser as 2014-2015 Muon Subsystem Manager

—————

There are a number of CB events throughout the December CMS week.

Monday Dec 9

1840:2030 ART@CMS featuring Artist Alison Gill http://www.alisongill.com/ presentation in the main auditorium as the last talk of the CMS plenary followed by refreshments in 61-1-201

1900:2200 CMS CB Networking Event for Alumni, Students, and Postdocs ( 80-1-001 ) Globe 1st floor

Tuesday Dec 10

1800:2000 Special Open CB meeting. Discussion with the candidates for CB Chair Jorgen d’Hondt, Guenakh Mitselmakher and Claudia Wulz. The meeting is open to the entire Collaboration and will be webcast and on Vidyo.

Wednesday Dec 11

1800:2000 Special (closed) CB Meeting: election of the CB Chair in Salle Bohr

Thursday Dec 12

1800:1930 Art@CMS Vernissage at Point 5 with refreshments, open to all members of CMS
Artist Alison Gill will present “To See a World” (new sculptures, prints and drawings). The title for this series is taken from William Blake’s visionary poem:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Friday Dec 13

Regular Meeting of the CB (#93) on Friday December 13 at 13:00 in the Filtration Plant
By popular demand the session will be webcast to CMS in parallel with the usual dedicated password protected Vidyo link for CB Institutional Representatives. This will allow everyone to watch the meeting.

Some of the items on the agenda:

• Vote on a broadened electorate for the Spokesperson election
• The MOU between CMS and TOTEM for the Precision Proton Spectrometer
• The Publications Plan
• Proposal to merge two PubComm boards (TOP and BPH) into a single one (Heavy Quark Physics)
• New chairs of PubComm boards (some chairs continuing; some stepping down)
• Updated membership PubComm, CMSDAS, International Committee, Young Scientist Committee

There will be reports from the CMS Theorist Group, CMS Detector Upgrade and Software Schools, the Young Scientist Committee and the Data Preservation and Open Access Committee. This is the last Collaboration Board meeting with Ian as Chair. Claudia will take over as acting CB Chair during the first half of 2014.

—————

CMS Achievement Awards

Every December many of the outstanding contributions to our experiment made in the past year by our young scientists are recognized with achievement awards. The Award Ceremony will take place on December 9, at the start of the Plenary Session of the CMS Week. Congratulations go to the following award winners:

• Run Coordination: Krisztian Krajczar (CERN) and Aron Soha (FNAL)
• Trigger Coordination: Daniele Trocino (Northwestern University), Zeyenep Demiragli (Brown Unversity)
• PPD: Laura Borrello (University of Wisconsin), Miguel Ojeda-Sandonis (CERN)
• Offline: David Abdurachmanov (Vilnius University), Matti Kortelainen (Helsinki Institute of Physics)
• Computing: Alan Malta Rodrigues (Rio de Janeiro)
• Upgrades: Bryan Dahmes (University of Minnesota), Elliiot Hughes (Rutgers), Andrew Levin (MIT)
• Tridas: Gregory Iles (Imperial College), Petr Zejdl (CERN)
• Tracker: Tomas Hreus (Zurich University), Rachel Yohay (University of California, Davis)
• ECAL: Marco Lucchini (Milano-Bicocca), Matteo Marone (INFN Trieste)
• HCAL: Beni Lutz (DESY), Halil Saka (Princeton)
• CASTOR: Hans Van Haevermaet (Antwerp University)
• Muons: Stefano Colafranceschi (CERN), Indara Suarez (Texas A&M University)

The remarkable contributions these young scientists have made are summarized in the award citations here:

—————

Option for a broadened electorate for the Spokesperson

An option to broaden the electorate for the Spokesperson was described in a document circulated to the CB and MoA list October 25.

The document gave both considerations for the option and considerations for maintaining the current system. It was widely discussed in the Collaboration. Of the 148 institutions with voting rights, 70 were in favor, 37 were not in favor and 41 did not respond.

While there is strong preference among institutions that have declared (65%) for the broadened electorate, the large number of undeclared institutions complicates the interpretation. Among those in favor many have suggested broadening the electorate to include graduate students appearing on the CMS author list. Due to the significant support for the option the CB will consider several proposals for broadening the electorate on December 13.

Proposal #1 The electorate in the election of the SP will be broadened YES/NO

If not approved: the current system is retained

If approved:
a) A Broadened Electorate Procedures Committee (BEPC) will be formed to study its implementation
(examples of topics to be considered by the BEPC include the role of the Election Committee,
the role and manner of conduct of the CB vote, method of voting by the broadened electorate, etc. )
The BEPC will report back to the CB within three months for consideration by the CB.

b) Proceed to proposal #2

Proposal #2 The broadened electorate will include the M&OA list YES/NO

If not approved: the BEPC will also make recommendations
on the composition of the electorate for consideration by the CB.

If approved: proceed to proposal #3

Proposal #3 to be voted on simultaneously:

(b) The broadened electorate will include in addition Emeriti YES/NO
(c) The broadened electorate will include in addition graduate students who qualify to be on the CMS author list YES/NO

As for all changes to the Constitution, the quorum is 50% (74 institutions), and a 2/3 majority of those participating in the vote is required for this change to be implemented, i.e. depending on the turnout 49-99 institutions must be in favor. If this is not the case, the current voting scheme will remain in effect.

—————

Communications in CMS

A review of our communications occurred last week. The review team looked at the scope of the communications group and made an assessment of the status. Items reviewed included information systems such as internal and external web pages, education and outreach activities, communication infrastructure and media work. The review committee will report to the CB on Friday. The review committee was chaired by Ken Bloom, and Jack Kai-Feng Chen, Marko Dragicevic, Boaz Klima, Pierluigi Paolucci as well as Steven Goldfarb, Outreach Coordinator of ATLAS, were members. The Spokesperson team and CB Chair team were ex-officio members.

—————

CMS Internal Posters Contest

The internal CMS Posters Contest was launched earlier this year. We received a small number of superb entries. Congratulations go to all participating institutes.

The CMS Communications group will keep records of all the posters for possible future use. Two winning posters (from the University of Ghent and the University of Napoli ) are shown in the "pas perdu" during the CMS Week. They are also available online: The story of CMS , by University of Napoli and The CMS Detector and Sub-detectors, by University of Ghent.

In addition, the contest enabled us to discover an outstanding idea for a game by the collaborators from the University of Bologna. The concept of the game is explained in the poster below, and all sub-detectors are requested to contribute in order to complete the project.

We hope the results will motivate more CMS institutes to participate in future contests.

—————

Coordinated funding

We have recently worked out a preliminary cost estimate for the Phase II Upgrade. Funding agencies are almost everywhere under pressure to reduce their contributions. It has therefore become extremely important to identify funding sources beyond our usual funding agencies. CMS must explore as many funding options as possible. Therefore a small group has started work under the umbrella of the Finance Board. It will make recommendations on how to exploit funding opportunities within particle physics around the globe, to which CMS institutions might be eligible to apply. The group will also seek to establish the degree of coordination between CMS institutions that presently exists within each country with regard to competing effectively for national funding resources and internationally for corresponding international funding resources. Using the information gathered the group will recommend actions that would best position CMS to be successful should its member institutions choose to compete for international and emerging national funding opportunities. Joao Varela and Paolo Giacomelli co-chair the group, they will be joined by Joel Butler. They have already benefitted from exploratory work by Geoff Hall and Peter Schleper.

—————

ART@CMS goes to Capitol Hill

The U.S. Particle physics community organized a highly successful visit to Washington D.C. to celebrate the Higgs Discovery and other recent discoveries in particle physics on November 20. Hosted by the House Science and National Labs Caucus, the invitations consisted of Xavier Cortada’s Higgs Discovery Art@CMS prints on plexiglass. These were given to all 100 US Senators and all 435 members of the House of Representatives. The event itself consisted of congressional visits during the day by faculty, scientists, post docs, and students and an evening reception in the Foyer of the Rayburn Office Building decorated with ART@CMS banners by Michael Hoch and Xavier Cortada. Six congressmen gave enthusiastic speeches about the importance of basic research including particle physics, and strong government funding for it, Joe Incandela recounted the Higgs discovery and Dave Charlton (ATLAS Spokesperson) discussed the global nature of particle physics. We estimate about 300 people attended the reception with about half of those being congressional staffers. The following day a staffer from the American Physical Society said: “I've received multiple calls today from Congressional offices interested in talking about the event, getting more information, giving congratulations, and also simply thanking us for the hard work that has been done. The event was incredibly well received on the hill and I have heard nothing but positive feedback.”

Particle Physics Community Reception in Washington D.C. on November 20 with ART@CMS banners on display.

—————

CMS is beautiful:

The Compact Muon Solenoid, December 2013.
—————