IRIS-HEP Strategic Plan for the Next Phase of Software Upgrades for HL-LHC Physics

Brian Bockelman, Peter Elmer, Gordon Watts

Published 2023-02-02Version 1

The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature and their interactions is one of the oldest and most ambitious of human scientific endeavors. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) represents a huge step forward in this quest. The discovery of the Higgs boson, the observation of exceedingly rare decays of $B$ mesons, and stringent constraints on many viable theories of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) demonstrate the great scientific value of the LHC physics program. The next phase of this global scientific project will be the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) which will collect data starting circa 2029 and continue through the 2030s. The primary science goal is to search for physics beyond the SM and, should it be discovered, to study its implications. In the HL-LHC era, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will record around 100 times as many collisions as were used to discover the Higgs boson (and at twice the energy). Both NSF and DOE are making large detector upgrade investments so the HL-LHC can operate in this high-rate environment. Similar investment in software R&D for acquiring, managing, processing and analyzing HL-LHC data is critical to maximize the return-on-investment in the upgraded accelerator and detectors. This report presents a strategic plan for a possible second 5-year funded phase (2023 through 2028) for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) which will close remaining software and computing gaps to deliver HL-LHC science.