Austria averts CERN withdrawal

With the Large Hadron Collider set to start experiments this fall, “now is possibly the best time in the history of CERN to be a member,” said the lab’s director general, Rolf Heuer. Yet on 7 May, Austria’s minister of science and research, Johannes Hahn, proposed that his country withdraw from the organization.

A squeezed budget and a need to renew “competitiveness and sparkle in the fields of science and research” were the reasons Hahn gave in a letter published on 14 May in many Austrian dailies. “Seventy percent of [our] funding for international cooperations in natural sciences goes to CERN,” said Nikola Donig, a ministry spokesman. The ministry intended to redirect the €16 million (roughly $22 million) it currently contributes to CERN (about 2% of CERN’s budget) to fund research grants and membership in five smaller international natural and social science projects: the European Southern Observatory and participation in the European Extremely Large Telescope; the European X-Ray Laser Project, XFEL, in Hamburg, Germany; FAIR, the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany; the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure; and the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure.

Within a week of the ministry’s surprise announcement, many prominent physicists had written letters decrying the suggestion that Austria quit CERN, and more than 20 000 people had signed a petition urging Parliament to reject the proposal. “That’s about two orders of magnitude more than the number of particle physicists in Austria,” said Walter Kutschera, an emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Vienna. “It’s about the worst moment to pull out of the biggest science experiment on the globe.” (The letters, petition, and other materials are on the Save Our Science website hosted by the nuclear and particle physics section of the Austrian Physical Society at http://sos.teilchen.at .)

Austria’s “solidarity with the other European countries and its reliability as a partner are at stake,” said Christian Fabjan, head of Austria’s Institute of High Energy Physics. He and others also worried that in Austria, fewer young people would be drawn to physics, industry would suffer, and particle physics would die. “While we have an important program at KEK in Japan,” said Fabjan, “it is fair to say that particle physics in Austria needs a strong connection to CERN to be viable. Without such a connection, particle physics will fade away on a time scale of 5 to 10 years.”

Fabjan and others were pinning their hopes on the petition swaying Parliament and on talks between the ministry of science and research and CERN. “I believe there is room for negotiation. I think CERN will have to move, Austria will have to move, and the Austrian scientific community will have to move,” Fabjan said.

But ministry spokesman Donig said the talks with CERN would be to minimize the damage of withdrawing. For example, he said, “We will talk about how to make sure that the people from Austria working at CERN have perspectives. And we would like to continue sending people to CERN with scholarships to do their PhDs.” The protests, he added, “show that we have to make clearer that we are going into other international partnerships and that other things we plan to do will help foster industry and make Austria more visible as a science partner.”

On 18 May, however, the science and research minister’s plans to quit CERN were quashed. The country’s Social Democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann, said that the ministers of his party would not vote to withdraw, which means that the necessary unanimous vote would be impossible, and that the issue would not go to Parliament. “If an agreement can’t be reached, things stay as they are,” Hahn acknowledged after meeting with the chancellor. He added that the debate would be a stepping-off point for a close look at the country’s participation in international projects.