LHC goes global

As CERN's major project for the future, the LHC sets a new scale in world-wide scientific collaboration. As well as researchers and engineers from CERN's 19 European Member States, preparations for the LHC now include scientists from several continents. Some 50 per cent of the researchers involved in one way or another with preparations for the LHC experimental programme now come from countries which are not CERN Member States. Underlining this enlarged international involvement is the recent decision by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture ('Monbusho') to accord CERN a generous contribution of five billion yen (about 65 million Swiss francs) to help finance the construction of the LHC. This money will be held in a special fund earmarked for construction of specific LHC components and related activities. To take account of the new situation, CERN is proposing to set up a totally new 'Associate State' status. This is foreseen as a flexible bilateral framework which will be set up on a case-by-case basis to adapt to different circumstances. This proposal was introduced to CERN Council in June, and will be further discussed later this year. These developments reflect CERN's new role as a focus of world science, constituting a first step towards a wider level of international collaboration. At the June Council session, as a first step, Japan was unanimously elected as a CERN Observer State, giving them the right to attend Council meetings. Introducing the topic at the Council session, Director General Chris Llewellyn Smith sketched the history of Japanese involvement in CERN research. This began in 1957 and has gone on to include an important experiment at the LEAR low energy antiproton ring using laser spectroscopy of antiprotonic helium atoms, the new Chorus neutrino experiment using an emulsion target, and a major contribution to the Opal experiment at the LEP electronpositron collider. In welcoming the development, many Council delegates looked forward to a fruitful new collaboration. They also pointed to the achievements of Japan's KEK Laboratory and its collaborative schemes, now a focal point of the world particle physics scene. A surprise item was the speech, in Japanese, by A. Herdina of the Austrian delegation. Strictly speaking Mr. Herdina was breaking the rules, as only English, French and German are catered for at CERN Council meetings, but in this instance everybody was happy that the Austrian delegate made his point