EIB lends CHF 250m for High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN
Staff Writer |
The European Investment Bank (EIB) has decided to provide a CHF 250m credit facility for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) which is the CERN’s central project for the decade.
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This is the second EIB financing with CERN, following the successful loan (300 M€) signed in 2002 to finance the building of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
This new EIB operation falls under InnovFin Large Projects, a financial product developed under Horizon 2020, the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
The finance contract was signed on Monday 19 September 2016 in Geneva by Fabiola Gianotti, Director General of CERN and Ambroise Fayolle, EIB Vice-President responsible for innovation, in the presence of his Excellency M. Peter Sørensen, Head of Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations Office and other international organisations in Geneva.
This large-scale financing will provide an important share of the resources required to implement the upgrade of the LHC, enabling the exploitation of the facility’s full capacity, and opening new scientific possibilities in the new high-energy frontier explored by the LHC since 2009 and attracting a global user-community of more than 7,000 scientists.
The HL-LHC project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2025.
It will provide more accurate measurements of fundamental particles and enable observation of rare processes that occur below the current sensitivity level.
The objective is to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value.
The High-Luminosity LHC project was announced as the top priority of the European Strategy for Particle Physics in 2013 and its funding is enshrined in CERN’s Medium-Term Plan. ■