OREANDA-NEWS. With fostering innovation to support research of scientific excellence and innovation as one of its top priorities, 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. 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 S?rensen, 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.

Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: "This loan under Horizon 2020, the EU's research funding programme, will help keep CERN and Europe at the forefront of particle physics research. It's an example of how EU funding helps extend frontiers of human knowledge."

“The EIB is very proud to finance such prestigious project in its pioneering scientific role and international influence. This new financing confirms our commitment to research and innovation  which are in the top priorities of the European Union's bank commented the Vice-President Ambroise Fayolle during the signing ceremony.  Thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, Europe has regained world leadership in High Energy Physics, a key sector of knowledge and technology. And with the project, it will remain the most powerful accelerator in the world for at least the next two decades.”

The project has been approved by the CERN’s Council of Member States in the Medium Term Plan for the period 2016-2020. It is part of the European Strategic Forum of Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), and as such a Strategic Research Infrastructure under the “Excellent Science” programme of Europe’s Horizon 2020. It realization will involve some 2 600 person years from 2015 until 2026.

The EIB loan is in line with the Horizon 2020 initiative and in particular the "InnovFin - EU Finance for Innovators" programme which provides customised products for financing the research and innovation (R&I) projects of small, medium-sized and large enterprises and promoters of research infrastructure.