TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINTH SESSION OF THE COUNCIL
24-25 September 2026
RESTRICTED COUNCIL
PRESIDENT’S REPORT
The President reported that, since the Council's June Session, he had attended meetings of the Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) Membership Selection Committee, the Audit Committee and the Pension Fund Governing Board (PFGB), as well as a tutorial for Council delegates and Finance Committee members organised by the Pension Fund Management Unit (PFMU). He also announced that all Council participants were cordially invited to the CERN Alumni "4th Collisions" event on the afternoon of the Council's meeting on Friday, 19 March 2027, which would be a great opportunity for them to hear about the impact of CERN alumni, to take part in panel discussions and to connect with alumni from their countries.
DIRECTOR-GENERAL’S REPORT
The Director-General reported on the following subjects:
- CERN Strategy for the years 2026-2030 and key performance indicators
- Update on machine performance and the start of Long Shutdown 3
- Latest developments regarding the Future Circular Collider
- Building international support for the Future Circular Collider
- Recent protocol visits.
CERN PENSION FUND
Report by the Chair of the Pension Fund Governing Board
The Council heard a presentation by Dr Buzatu, in his capacity as Chair of the PFGB, covering the key issues discussed by the Board at its meeting on 18 September 2026, the latest member and beneficiary activities, the current macroeconomic context and investment market outlook, and the Fund’s investment performance of 3.88% as of 30 June 2026, 1.35 percentage points above the real return target.
Report of the Pension Fund Governing Board on the Review of the Plan to Reach Full Funding
The Council further took note of a PFGB report delivered by Dr Buzatu and Mr Heron, the Chief Executive of the Fund, describing its thorough review of the Pension Fund's funding plan undertaken over the past twelve months and concluding that, notwithstanding the usual risks and uncertainties associated with a defined benefit pension scheme, the existing plan for achieving full funding by 2056 remains credible.
LHC and HL-LHC MATTERS
The Council heard a presentation by the Director for Accelerators and Technology,
Dr Brüning, on the status of the accelerator complex and upgrades, covering the programme of work for the various injectors and experiment areas during the third Long Shutdown (LS3); the ongoing warm-up of the LHC, the progress of equipment dismantling and removal and other preparations for the installation of the HL-LHC; the dashboards developed to monitor the progress of the LS3 activities; the successful completion of the first powering phase of the IT String test facility and the lessons learned for the installation of equipment in the tunnel; the status of the HL-LHC magnet cryostating and production; and the in-kind contributions to the HL-LHC project.
The Council then heard a presentation by the Director for Research and Computing, Professor Hamel de Monchenault, on the status of the experiments and computing, covering the successful completion of Run 3 data taking and the publication of results; the impact of the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence on computing costs for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG); the status of LS3 work for the experiments and the progress of the Phase 2 upgrades of ATLAS and CMS; highlights of recent physics results; and progress with the plans for the Phase 2b upgrades of ALICE and LHCb during the fourth Long Shutdown (LS4).
NON-LHC EXPERIMENTS
The Council heard a second presentation by Professor Hamel de Monchenault, on CERN’s non-LHC experiments, covering the latest results from and the status of NA62, NA66/AMBER, NA64, NA61/SHINE, the ongoing development of the non-collider physics roadmap and preparations for the installation of the two large cryostats for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) in the United States.
The Council congratulated CERN and its personnel on the excellent performance of the 2026 data-taking campaign and on the significant progress made towards the HL-LHC across the accelerators and detectors.
FUTURE CIRCULAR COLLIDER REFERENCE DESIGN PHASE: PROPOSED ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE AND REFERENCE DESIGN REVIEW PROCESS
On the recommendation of Scientific Policy Committee, the Council approved the proposed organisational structure and review process for the FCC Reference Design Phase and took note of the project management arrangements for that Phase, as presented by the Director-General and described in document CERN/SPC/1291/RA/Rev.- CERN/4016/RA/Rev.
Implementing the European Strategy: supporting documentation for the FCC-ee decision-making process
The Council took note of a presentation by the Director-General of document CERN/SPC/1299/RA-CERN/4032/RA and of the conclusions set out therein: “The updated European Strategy for Particle Physics identified the FCC-ee as the clear preference for CERN’s next flagship collider, with a descoped/staged version as the alternative option. Consequently, CERN is strongly focussed on progressing the FCC-ee as the sole option for CERN’s next flagship collider. The development of the options analysis documentation, described herein, is to support the FCC-ee decision-making processes in CERN’s Member States that require such an approach. The choices of LEP3 and LCF250 for the options analysis documentation are intended to provide illustrative scenarios that are lower in cost than that of a descoped version of FCC-ee. These choices are in no way meant to prejudice a decision on the future direction for CERN in the event of the FCC-ee not being approved. If necessary, this would be the topic of a future limited European Strategy for Particle Physics process.”
CLOSED COUNCIL
REPORT OF THE SCIENTIFIC POLICY COMMITTEE (SPC) MEMBERSHIP SELECTION COMMITTEE – PROPOSAL FOR NEW SPC MEMBERS
The Council heard a presentation by the Chair of the SPC Membership Selection Committee, Professor Rabinovici, and decided to follow the Committee's recommendation to appoint the following ten candidates as members of the SPC starting on 1 January 2027, for four-year non-renewable terms of office, in accordance with the procedure laid down in Section IV of the SPC's Terms of Reference (document CERN/3739/Rev.):
- Sally Dawson, Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA
- Luigi Del Debbio, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Francesco Forti, University of Pisa, Italy
- Francis Halzen, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
- Silvia Pascoli, University of Bologna, Italy
- Gavin Salam, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Géraldine Servant, DESY, Germany,
- Fernando Toral, CIEMAT, Spain
- Christian Weinheimer, University of Münster, Germany
- Guy Wilkinson, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
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