Countries vie to become first African associate members of Europe’s high-energy physics facility
Morocco and Egypt are jockeying to become the first African associate member countries of Cern, Europe’s high-energy physics facility, a conference heard this week.
Both countries “have signalled interest” in applying for associate membership, Cern’s head of experimental physics, Manfred Krammer, told the sixth global Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics conference held in Cape Town, South Africa, on 4-6 September.
Associate members pay a reduced membership fee to Cern. They sit on its council but do not have voting rights. Current associate members are Croatia, India, Latvia, Lithuania, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine. Cyprus, Estonia and Slovenia are all in the pre-stages of associate membership.
South Africa, which has had a cooperation agreement with Cern since 2008 and accounts for more than half of the approximately 100 Africans using the facility, has no formal plans for association yet.
Associate Cern membership would “come with additional expenses but also additional returns,” Bruce Mellado, director of the University of the Witwatersrand Institute for Collider Particle Physics and a senior scientist at South Africa’s iThemba Labs, told Research Professional News.
These returns would include more access to knowledge and technology, he said, adding that the “time is ripe” to be talking about association. “As a community we are trying to devise a strategy that would allow us to get there.”
Membership diversity is a fundamental aim of Cern, Krammer told the conference. The facility was created in the wake of the Second World War as a way to heal Europe through scientific collaboration.
Cern wants to expand its footprint in Africa, he added. At the moment, Sudan, Tanzania and Rwanda have expressed an interest in entering cooperation agreements with Cern, while Cern runs several training programmes on the continent, he said.
It is a step in the right direction that the TIPP conference is being hosted in Africa for the first time, said Maksym Titov, research director at CEA, France’s atomic energy commission.