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If Europe has to go it alone in building the Large Hadron Collider,
all existing projects at CERN, the European centre for particle physics,
might have to stop for four years. This proposal forms part of a plan drawn
up by CERN’s managers in a last-ditch effort to convince its member states
to go ahead with the LHC. The plan will be put to an emergency meeting of
member states in April.

The LHC would be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The
problem is how to find the $1 billion needed to build it. Some European
governments do not want to increase their subscriptions to CERN, and the
US and Japan are reluctant to contribute. The new plan, put together by
Christopher Llewellyn-Smith, the director-general of CERN, would provide
a way without the extra funds.

According to Lyn Evans, director of future accelerators at CERN, savings
would come from spreading the cost of the project by delaying completion
from 2002 to 2004, and shutting down CERN’s other machines, such as the
Large Electron-Positron collider, earlier than planned. ‘It would be very
undesirable,’ says Evans. ‘The hole in the physics programme would be very
big. But we may have to put all our resources into the LHC.’

The hiatus would leave the world’s leading centre for high-energy physics
in limbo for four years and would prevent many students at CERN from completing
their PhDs. Around 6000 researchers who use CERN’s facilities would have
to go elsewhere.

Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs want to build the LHC in order to probe the basic building
blocks of matter. They hope to find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle
that could be the key to understanding the origins of mass (This Week, 11
September 1993). The new plan has been forced on CERN by Llewellyn-Smith’s
failure to secure funding from countries outside Europe, despite an intense
round of lobbying that he began after the US abandoned the Superconducting
Supercollider last October. Canada has expressed a vague interest in the
project, but the Americans and Japanese have stayed aloof. Evans says CERN
has now abandoned any hope that the US or Japan will make an early decision
on the LHC, but hopes both countries will join later. The new plan is intended
to ‘convince member states we can complete the LHC with only European resources’.

This may not be enough, however. Spain, Germany and Britain want to
reduce their payments to the centre and may veto the plan. They want to
see promises of big contributions to the LHC from outside Europe before
the project goes ahead.

According to Sandy Donnachie, Britain’s representative on CERN’s governing
council, most member states want to make a commitment to the LHC by June.
‘But Britain is sitting firmly on the fence.’

The last major laboratory to shut down its research in order to build
a big machine was Fermilab near Chicago. In 1982 it ran down research for
a year in order to build the Tevatron collider. ‘It was frustrating,’ says
Leon Lederman, a Nobel prizewinner then working at Fermilab. ‘There was
discouragement. We lost some young people who didn’t want to wait around.’