In normal times, the four major physics experiments using proton collisions at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland publish dozens of scientific articles a year. But in March 2022, the number of new research papers produced by the LHC experiments dropped to zero. Reason: lack of agreement on how to list Russian and Belarusian scientists and institutions, if at all. The interim agreement, which is in place so far, should not be announced.
Articles are the hard currency of research, used for the exchange of information and evidence of the contributions of individuals and financial institutions. The four largest experiments at the LHC involve the collaboration of thousands of scientists and engineers, and publications are often provided to all members of the project.
According to Cern sources, after the attack on Ukraine some members refused to cooperate with Russian organizations and even people who work for them (which make up 7 percent of the workforce). Fedor Ratnikov, a Russian physicist, explains that no publication policy has satisfied the two-thirds requirement of institutions participating in each collaboration. “We have Ukrainian colleagues for whom this question is very painful. [But] most of my Ukrainian colleagues do not extend the responsibility of this attack to their colleagues from in Russian institutions. I would say that my colleagues in the EU are very strong.”
Cern: what to look out for in 2023
The four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are dedicated to the study of the Standard Model – the theory that now describes the world’s smallest structures – and, most importantly, of any deviation from which it may appear.
Properties of the Higgs boson For Atlas and CMS, the two “general purpose” horses, the properties of the Higgs boson are new unknowns. After discovering its existence a decade ago, scientists are investigating how it interacts with other particles. See the article : Ukrainian Forces Make Some Gains in North, South. Anything different from the predictions of the Standard Model would be a good reach, especially after years of no evidence for other proposed theories consistent with the SM, such as supersymmetry .
Matter-antimatter symmetry Since last summer the LHC has been performing a larger number of proton collisions at higher energies, and researchers plan to see if these differences will confirm and reveal information about them.
Immediately after the big bang, the LHC collides not only with protons, but also with the nuclei of lead atoms, creating a situation similar to the moment after the Big Bang. Years ago, ALICE (Large Ion Collider Experiment) studied this “quark-gluon plasma”; now it’s ready to analyze the data. Eleni Petrakou
Andreas Höecker, a spokesman for the Atlas test, emphasizes that this issue “is only related to the type of institutional recognition, given the statements of high-level representatives of Russian educational institutions … the government”.
Since March, the four LHC experiments have continued to compile new articles, sending them to journals for peer review and halting their publication. The unpublished pipeline now includes over 70 episodes.
Public translations have been uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, but they and those published in journals do not have a list of authors and funding bodies. Where in the past this list would take several pages, now there is a general description, for example, “Atlas cooperation”.
Scientists from Europe and the US say that so far there has been little impact on funding or awarding PhDs. However, a senior LHC scientist from outside Europe says: “Keep this political approach for some time and it can cause problems for students, postdocs and for us.” Brajesh Choudhary, a professor at Delhi University and a member of Cern’s CMS detector experiment, says: “If you don’t publish in the next few months PhD students, postdocs and young faculty will face a lot of problems .”
Choudhary points out that anonymous articles and institutions can be accepted within trials, but not by outside scientists and faculty, and that institutions care about being mentioned when they give their positions. . As for financial institutions, if they are not appreciated, “I can tell you … that they will not respond well.”
Last year, the Cern council decided to terminate the observer status of the Russian Federation and cooperation agreements with Belarus when they expire after two years (Ukraine is an associated member of Cern, which its permanent members include 22 European countries and Israel, with cooperation extending to several dozen countries worldwide). A spokesperson for Cern said that “measures dealing with [a military attack by a related member], are against the principles of peaceful cooperation”, adding that “the decision leaves the door open for peaceful scientific cooperation if the situation allowed in the future.”
Regarding the literature, at the LHC board meeting in October the Cern administration admitted that “communication on collaborations is very difficult” and recommended to the various experimental boards that “authorities should be established for reasons of science”.
Ratnikov, who worked on accelerator-based experiments for American and German institutions before returning to Moscow in 2016 as a professor, believes that the suspension of publications is not the biggest problem. “From conversations with my Russian colleagues, no one can accept what Russia is doing in Ukraine. They continue to do their work: to conduct scientific research, to teach students… [We] there is this negative pressure at Cern despite many years, sometimes a significant part of [scientists’] lives, spent on the success of Cern’s experiments.”
According to John Ellis, a professor at King’s College London and a former physicist at Cern: “The Russians working at Cern are covered by international cooperation agreements. If these fall, then there is no legal basis for them to operate in Switzerland but still some have signed open letters protesting [against] the war.” He explains that the abolition of observer status in 2024 provides protection until then, in the hope of a permanent solution to the negotiations, but wants “the protection of scientists” in general.
Although unique, the case of the LHC experiments is part of a wider trend. The German Research Institute has warned scientists against publishing co-authors with Russian institutions. Commentaries on the Internet of Science website have stopped reviewing articles from Russia. There have been reports of individual referees rejecting the articles. And while Russian institutions are being excluded from international projects, other fields are seeing a direct impact – such as climate change research, which is being set back by the freeze on cooperation in the Arctic.
In a letter published in Science last year, five prominent western scientists urged their colleagues not to “abandon Russian scientists”. One of them, Nina Fedoroff, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, says that “the other situation seems to be very symbolic”. In his opinion, scientific discussions “can sort out the bad actors from the good actors, but we do much less through official channels than we could.”
As for the LHC problem, people at Cern point to a solution used in the Belle II physics experiment in Japan. Belle II began to list authors and their institutions replaced by Orcid (open researcher and donor ID), an information project widely used in physics research that connects authors and their institutions. However, it is reported that the Polish government opposed this tactic, not accepting the clear exclusion of Polish organizations. This issue is still up in the air.
When the international physics community finds itself in an unusual situation, for scientists like Ellis, “Maintaining scientific cooperation is the most important thing, as a good way to bring people together to solve the problems of mankind.” Or, as Fedoroff notes: “During the so-called cold war, the cooperation between Russian and American physicists and between physicists and their respective governments was credited for keep the war cold.”
