No physics analysis at the Large Hadron Collider LHC without DESY involvement: from autumn 2024, the role of physics coordinator of both large experiments at the LHC at CERN in Geneva will be held by DESY scientists.  The board of the international CMS collaboration confirmed that from September 2024 until August 2026, DESY scientist Andreas Meyer will be CMS Physics Coordinator. CMS is is one of the two gigantic multi-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. The CMS collaboration consists of more than 5000 people from around the world, including some 400 scientists in Germany and 75 at DESY. Andreas Meyer is one of them. He joined DESY in 2005 and has worked on two other particle physics experiments, H1 and Babar, before joining CMS in 2007. Within the CMS collaboration, Meyer is a specialist for top quark physics and the organisation of the performance, calibrations, and datasets necessary to achieve high-quality physics results.

As the CMS Physics Coordinator, Andreas Meyer will be managing the physics programme of the international CMS collaboration. The physics coordinators are the two principal scientists tasked with comprehensively organising the entire scientific output generated by the CMS experiment. The main mandate of physics coordination is to guide the research pursued by thousands of CMS physicists as they engage in measurements or explore novel realms of physics. Meyer will be responsible for the organisation and quality of the physics results coming out of the CMS experiment, including approximately 100 papers per year.

“I am really excited to take responsibility at this point in time,” says Meyer. “Among the major goals during my term will be the publication of first results from the complete LHC Run 3 data and the preparation of Run 4. These will each constitute leaps in physics reach and precision.”

The next round of data-taking at the LHC, called Run 4, is scheduled to start in 2029, and the LHC groups at DESY are contributing major components to the upgrade of the detectors. The particle physicists in Hamburg are in a unique position, as in the coming two years both large LHC collaborations’ physics coordination groups are led by physicists from DESY.  Earlier this spring,  DESY Lead Scientist Kerstin Tackmann was selected in the identical role of physics coordinator of the ATLAS collaboration. The ATLAS and CMS collaborations together make up the largest fraction of particle physicists with almost 10 000 scientists, engineers and students all over the world involved. DESY has large stakes in both and is one of the world’s leading physics groups. 

“The fact that DESY provides two highly experienced and competent physicists as physics coordinators to the two largest LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS, illustrates our leadership in the field,” says Beate Heinemann, Director in charge of particle physics at DESY. “They will be busy and carry a large responsibility, but will also have fun being at the forefront of the many exciting LHC results we are hoping for in the  coming years.”