Cern’s Iranian connection is a model for thawing relations

Particle physics has helped Iranian physicists develop collaborations with their western colleagues. Further progress depends on resolving the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, says John Ellis.

It is not always easy being a physicist in Iran. Between 2010 and 2012, three were assassinated in what were presumed to be attacks on the country’s nuclear programme. Dissidence is also dangerous: another physicist, Omid Kokabee, has been in prison since 2011 for refusing to participate in military research. Earlier this month, Kokabee was awarded, in absentia, the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But there have been positive, if less well-publicised, developments. For more than a decade, Iranian researchers have been working at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, and they made an important contribution to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. With relations between Iran and Europe showing signs of improving, the hope is that such collaboration will start to develop more freely.