Towards the CERN of tomorrow

The Council working group on the geographical and scientific enlargement of CERN met for the first time during the week of 9 March. It was a good meeting, setting the pace for what promises to be a very important process. A timetable for meetings and consultations has been put in place, and all being well we can look forward to recommendations being made at the December meeting of Council this year.

Since my talk to the CERN staff in January, much has been made of my statement that nothing is off the table, so I’d like to make it clear what that means. The CERN Convention is required reading for my job. It’s a remarkably concise and prescient document, as relevant today as it was when it was written over half a century ago. If you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend that you read it.

The Convention states that the Organization shall "provide for collaboration among European States", and goes on to say that CERN should be involved in "the organization and sponsoring of international co-operation." Under the Convention’s conditions of membership, it describes conditions for accession, but nowhere does it state explicitly that membership should be limited to European nations. I’ve highlighted this as a way of focusing attention on a major challenge the global particle physics community faces today. We need to think carefully about how to organize ourselves for the future, and about the role institutions like CERN must play.

We need a strategy that strengthens our field at all levels: national, regional and global, deploying limited resources where they can be put to best use. This strategy should ensure that small-scale projects are done locally, but as part of a globally integrated programme. Projects requiring more substantial resources, those at the high-energy frontier for example, should be conceived and implemented as global projects from the start. To make this work, funding agencies and scientists alike will need to establish new ways of working together.

I’m convinced that particle physics needs more than a single global project to remain healthy. We need to ensure that complementary projects are implemented in those regions best placed to host them, without duplicating effort. Astronomers already do this: telescopes are placed where the view of the sky is best, but wherever the facilities are they host people from all over the world. The LHC does this, but in the future I’d like to see all particle physics planned in an integrated way, from the smallest experiments to the biggest.

This is just my view, and mine is one among many. That’s why the Council working group is so important. For particle physics to advance globally, we need global input now: representatives from the Americas and Asia will be involved in the process, and the results will be available for the world to use. I’m looking forward to participating in this process, and to seeing what kind of future CERN emerges.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer