Dear Commons Community,
Russian physicists have been banished since late last year from Europe’s CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, and increasingly isolated by trade sanctions that have complicated purchases of scientific equipment, many Russian physicists are having to dramatically reorient their work—with some looking to China for collaboration. As reported in Science.
Some Russian scientists have found ways to sustain their connections to CERN and other institutions in Europe and the United States. But they have faced pressure from Russian officials to sever ties.
The breakdown in collaborations, catalyzed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is producing “obvious losses” for all sides, says Alla Skovorodina, a spokesperson for the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP), a leading Russian research center. Researchers from the institute had worked with CERN for decades, she notes, a collaboration that “has always been mutually beneficial.” Russian scientists played a significant role, for example, in building and operating the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two key particle detectors fed by the world’s largest atom smasher, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which discovered the Higgs boson.
But several hundred Russian scientists were forced to end their work at CERN on 30 November 2024, after the laboratory terminated its partnership agreements with institutes operated by the governments of Russia and Belarus, Russia’s close ally. At least 90 Russian researchers sidestepped the ban by reaffiliating with institutes in other nations, according to a CERN spokesperson. The ban also did not apply to scientists affiliated with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) near Moscow, which is operated by a coalition of more than a dozen nations and has its own agreement with CERN.
More Russian researchers might have attempted to reaffiliate if not for opposition from prominent Russian officials, says Andrey Seryakov, a Russian physicist who in recent years had spent up to 3 months a year at CERN. For example, when researchers attempted to establish a new organization, based outside Russia, that would have enabled Russian scientists to continue working at CERN, they faced fierce criticism from physicist Mikhail Kovalchuk, president of the Kurchatov Institute nuclear energy research center, who is known for his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Given that most Russian scientists working at CERN have their main place of work in Russian universities and research centers, most of them were forced to refuse to cooperate,” Seryakov says.
Although Seryakov can no longer work at CERN, he says he is still analyzing data he collected at the laboratory while he looks for a job. (He lost a post at St. Petersburg State University because of political activism.)
Other Russian physicists who have lost access to CERN say they will turn to domestic projects, such as the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility under construction at JINR, which will create fleeting puffs of fundamental particles called a quarkgluon plasma, and a pair of small electron-positron colliders at BINP. The larger of the two produces a particle called the tau lepton, a fleeting heavier cousin of the electron. The smaller, just 24 meters in circumference, has pioneered a new technique to produce round particle beams, which are more compact and stable than the usual flat, ribbonlike ones. That should enable a collider to run longer before refilling the beams. “These are worthy projects, although they are not as advanced as the LHC,” says physicist Fedor Ratnikov of the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
At BINP, another “promising direction is China,” Skovorodina says. China has ambitious plans for a next-generation collider that could surpass the LHC in energy, she notes, “and our institute plans to participate.”
In the meantime, Russian physicists continue to struggle with trade sanctions that have made it difficult to obtain electronics and other high-tech gear from the U.S. and Europe, and ongoing pressure from Ukraine and its allies to expel Russia from other collaborations. For example, a BINP researcher says Russian contributions to a nuclear physics experiment called PANDA at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, a large accelerator project currently under construction in Germany, have been largely frozen.
Such ruptures trouble Anatoli Romaniouk, a Russian physicist who has worked at CERN since 1990 and was not directly affected by the ban. “Science is a bridge that allows people to communicate and exchange both intellectual and moral products,” he says, adding that he will try to maintain some communication with colleagues in Russia, in part because he thinks it is important to “give young scientists the opportunity to participate and develop in the global scientific community.” But he’s not optimistic that U.S. and European institutions will become more welcoming to Russia anytime soon. “I do not foresee any significant changes in attitudes towards Russian scientists in the next decade,” he says. “And perhaps longer.”
Science indeed can be a bridge between countries!
Tony
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