Munich

Luciano Maiani, director-general of the Geneva-based European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), last week called on the organization's 20 member states to put in place a “vigorous programme of accelerator research and development” to help maintain CERN's leading position in particle physics in the long term.

CERN's current core activity, the search for the still elusive Higgs particles, will continue, Maiani told the CERN Council last week. Higgs particles, if they exist, are predicted to be in the range of CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), experimental work on which is to start next year.

But funding for future work, including the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and research into high-intensity proton accelerators aimed at producing a second-generation neutrino beam, is “barely sufficient”, he said. These projects currently receive around 1% of CERN's resources. This was acceptable during the construction phase of the LHC, Maiani said, but now “it is time to start a gradual increase”.