London

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, is seeking help from outside experts as it struggles to find a way through the funding crisis triggered by cost overruns on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project.

At a meeting of the laboratory's finance committee on 6 November, CERN managers said they would appoint an external review board to assess future financing needs through to 2012 for both the LHC and the lab as a whole. The board will be set up later this month and should produce a preliminary report by the end of this year, with a final one to follow in June 2002.

The laboratory's effort to build the LHC, the world's most powerful proton accelerator, has gone over budget by several hundred million dollars (see Nature 413, 441; 2001).

In a statement posted on its website on 16 October, CERN's director-general, Luciano Maiani, hinted strongly that the LHC could not be completed without more money from the member states. “CERN's capacity to absorb these extra costs has been severely limited,” he wrote. “Support from the governments and funding agencies is now essential to reach a solution.”

But at the finance meeting, several delegates insisted that there would be no extra contributions from them to bail out the project.

Neil Calder, a spokesman for CERN, says that Maiani's call for support was not necessarily a request for more money. He claims that, if required, CERN could build the LHC without extra contributions but “that would not be the optimum solution”.

Meanwhile, CERN has appointed four internal 'task forces' to find savings from its research programmes, its staffing, its industrial links and its organizational structure.