Russia's exit from CERN: time to revive its collider

News the withdrawal of Russia from the so-called CERN stirred up near-scientific community. Putin does not need science, they began to write in the comments in this post. But is it really so?

CERN is a nuclear energy research organization with 22 countries. CERN is located on the border of France and Switzerland and is considered the most advanced laboratory of high energy physics in the world. The accelerator complex is hidden underground at a depth of approximately 100 meters.



CERN employs over two thousand researchers, many hundreds of universities and institutes from 85 countries have delegated thousands of physicists and engineers to participate in CERN scientific experiments. The annual assessed contributions of the participating countries are close to a billion dollars. Possessing the status of an observer country at CERN, Russia allocated in 2017 330 million rubles from the Reserve Fund for the modernization of the Large Hadron Collider.

It is possible that the decision to terminate observer country status and financing could be caused by cooling relations with Western partners, on whose territory the entire project infrastructure is located. In the context of complicated international relations, it is advisable to rely on our own research projects. Perhaps the time has come to remember that in the Moscow city of Protvino the project of its own hadron collider was mothballed from Soviet times.

The Protvino accelerator-storage complex of the Institute for High Energy Physics is almost the size of the Large Hadron Collider CERN. The diameter of the tunnel is 5 meters, the length of its ring is almost 21 kilometers. The depth of the accelerator ranges from 20 to 60 meters. If it were not for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration processes that followed, the domestic particle accelerator could have been commissioned earlier than the Large Hadron Collider. The Protvino accelerator is still the highest energy in the Russian Federation.

In 1991, problems began with the financing of construction. With great difficulty, over the next years, builders were able to successfully close the ring of the underground tunnel, the injection tunnel was 100% completed. We managed to make the vacuum equipment of the injection channel, the pumping system, the power supply device, and the control and monitoring system using the remaining funds. Heroic efforts brought to completion the Neptune Hall, designed for accelerator targets and test equipment.

In 1994, funding for the project ceased. After the financial crisis of 1998, it was not at all before science. The decision to participate in the international project to launch the Large Hadron Collider made funding for the domestic project irrelevant. Since its successful launch in 2008, the Soviet project has been safely forgotten. The need to protect the abandoned Soviet accelerator and pump water from its tunnels is a burden on the budget.

However, in connection with recent events, the issue of resuscitation of a domestic project may again become relevant. The project can be used to work in the field of basic science; it is supposed to study cancer treatment methods by irradiating tumors with particle beams. It seems appropriate to invest budget funds in financing Russian science and the construction of scientific infrastructure in the Russian Federation.