The State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER) has entrusted the Swiss National Science Foundation’s (SNSF) Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences division (Division II) with the administration of the Fund for Research at CERN (FORCE).
FORCE is primarily designed to support the participation of Swiss researchers in the implementation and evaluation of detectors in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but is also available for other CERN installations.
For 2010, the steering committee FORCE has compiled a list of priorities of the experiments that can be supported through the budget line FORCE. These priorities are defined as follows:
1. Completion of the construction of the LHC detectors (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb) ; computing developments ; maintenance and operation of the detectors.
2. Projects belonging to the category « CERN approved experiments » (extension of the LHC experiments and other related projects like NA61 and OPERA).
3. Developments in view of the Super-LHC (CLIC)
4. Experiments in the category « CERN recognized » located at CERN in Geneva.
The fund has an annual budget of CHF 4.8 million.
Interested research groups submit a FORCE application parallel to their regular application or grant for funding to the SNSF (deadline for submission: 1 October).
Research plan and evaluation
The research plan is the same as for a regular application. However, it must be supplemented with an explanatory scientific/technical statement and a specific budget. On request and in exceptional cases, a FORCE application can be submitted independently of the regular application. With FORCE applications, funding of material for the development, construction and evaluation of CERN experiments can be requested. Such equipment may be located at CERN or at Swiss research institutions. Furthermore, it is now possible to ask for funding of technical personal affected to a FORCE experiment. The salary request should not exceed one position or 25% of the total budget.
The submitted applications will be evaluated by the Division II of the Research Council. The scientific quality of the regular SNSF project will be taken into account in this evaluation. Moreover the guidelines of the FORCE steering committee will be considered (see priorities above).