Collaboration with Russian research institutes within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), headquartered in Geneva, ends at the end of November. This could have consequences for science, according to a German expert.
“Russia has strong engineering expertise,” Beate Heinemann of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) research center in Hamburg told the German news agency dpa. “It’s not that some research is now impossible due to the end of cooperation, but it makes things more difficult and there could be delays.” Beate Heinemann is director of the particle physics department at Desy.
Russian scientists transferred their expertise as much as possible
“We hope that there will be no major loss in scientific output,” adds CERN’s director of research and computing, Joachim Mnich. Russian scientists transferred their expertise to their colleagues as much as possible. “We cannot continue to operate a component of the detector, but this is not a big gap,” said Joachim Mnich.
For the record, in reaction to the military invasion of Ukraine, the CERN Council decided in June 2022 to end cooperation with Russia and its Belarusian ally. This measure will come into force on November 30 for Moscow and has already been in force since June 27 for Minsk. The two countries are linked to CERN by five-year agreements, and the organization has decided to terminate them when they expire.
