At a meeting on December 9 at CERN between U.S. physicists and members of the CMS management, spokesman Michel Della Negra stated that CMS would willingly accept a substantial number of U.S. physicists. He also enumerated several areas in which U.S. groups could make major contributions to CMS: hadronic calorimetry, forward muon systems, inner tracking, and trigger/DAQ systems. These areas were deemed to be those of maximal opportunity, and subsequent discussions focused on them.
Subsequently, UCLA, one of the four U.S. signatories to the CMS LoI, hosted a meeting to give interested US physicists the opportunity to discuss the possibilities of collaboration with CMS. Opportunities were explored using the mechanism of subsystem sessions jointly chaired by CMS coordinators of the various detector subsystems and US conveners. The meeting, held from February 2-4, attracted over 130 participants. Several specific areas of mutual interest, first defined in the December meeting, emerged in more detail.
These opportunities and the interests of US groups were further refined in subsequent meetings at Fermilab on February 15 (DPF Workshop), March 23 (US CMS meeting of new groups), and April 6-7 (US CMS meeting on LoI and management). Details of the US groups who are interested in pursuing TeV scale physics at CMS, their longterm goals, and their immediate R&Dactivities and needs follows.