MANAMA: Leading particle physics research center CERN is looking to deepen its collaboration with Saudi Arabia by opening a data center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a staff member has told Arab News.
Martin Gastal, CERN adviser to the Middle East and North African region, told Arab News that “the ambition of the Kingdom is to try and integrate CERN into one of its drivers for research,” adding that there are plans to launch the center at the Saudi university to analyze CERN data.
KAUST already collaborates with the Swiss center, with four KAUST students taking part in internships at CERN.
According to Gastal, the Research, Development and Innovation Authority in Saudi Arabia aims to bring together more particle physicists in the Kingdom to improve research efficiency.
Also working with NEOM University, Gastal said he hopes to find synergies between the technology developed at CERN and the research conducted at Saudi universities.
“Scientific cooperation is a way of bringing together lots of brains with different ways of thinking that bring different ideas to the table and maybe also different techniques for testing those ideas,” CERN physicist John Ellis told Arab News.
Ellis, who holds the Clerk Maxwell Professorship of theoretical physics at King’s College London, and is known for his work in helping discover the Higgs-Boson particle, spoke to Arab News at a recent event on promising work in nuclear research and particle physics.
“Most countries in the Gulf region now have some sort of collaboration with CERN … Bahrain is perhaps the most advanced,” he said.
Ellis added that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Oman have also forged significant partnerships with CERN, with Saudi Arabia taking part in one of its experiments.
He said that CERN’s biggest focus is on “the smallest constituents of matters,” or the particles that make up the universe.
The research center aims to understand the behavior of these particles and decipher how they once behaved in the early history of the universe to answer the fundamental questions of who we are, why we are here and where we are going.
One focus is on the particles that make up dark matter, which, astrophysicists believe, constitute most of the matter in the universe, Ellis said.
CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. It works by colliding hadrons to create new particles and it is responsible for discovering the Higgs-Boson in 2012, a breakthrough that Ellis said was the “holy grail that we physicists have been looking for, for almost 50 years.”
Now, the focus is on carrying out more particle collisions and upgrading the experiments.
“The technological output from CERN is not just from the particles that we discover, but also from the techniques we develop to discover those particles.”
Ellis spoke to Arab News at a CERN event held jointly with the American University of Bahrain and the Sheikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa Center for Culture and Research in Manama on Tuesday.
The event hosted officials from CERN and Bahrain universities to discuss scientific collaboration between Gulf and international countries in particle physics.
