Russia and CERN are working out a new format of cooperation

News, 14 March 2018

A new agreement with CERN that is planned to be signed this year will affirm Russian participation in the second stage of development of the Large Hadron Collider and in all experiments conducted at the facility.

Photo © CERN

Russia and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been successfully cooperating for about 60 years. The current agreement was signed in 1993. The status and names of organizations who signed the agreement, laws, and set of discussed experiments has changed since then.

In 2017, CERN and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science came to the arrangement to sign a new agreement that would give Russia a special status for participation in the experiments. This agreement will have a much higher status and will contribute to cooperation more than associated membership.

In 2018, a new agreement between the Russian Government and CERN is planned to be signed that will affirm participation of Russia in the second stage of development of the Large Hadron Collider and all the experiments conducted at the facility.

Furthermore, the new agreement presupposes participation of CERN in construction of Russian mega science facilities. The draft of the agreement is undergoing the approval procedures. In the first half of the year, the agreement is suggested to be considered at the CERN International Council, and then the document will be signed. As a result, Russia will enhance its status in the largest international research organization in the fields of nuclear physics.

Background information

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the largest in the world organization for nuclear physics research with headquarters in Geneva. The organization was established in 1953. Soviet scientists has been participating in CERN experiments since 1960s. In 1996, Russia joined the project of the Large Hadron Collider. Nowadays, some distributed net servers for data processing obtained by the accelerator are kept at the territory of the Russian Federation.

Source: Russian Ministry of Education and Science