Scientists and researchers around the world are struggling because of the war in Ukraine

The ATLAS experiment, one of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle detectors.

CERN

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

The war in Ukraine also has consequences for the scientific world.

Many international cooperations with Russia have been suspended since the Moscow offensive and this has an impact on the production of articles.

Illustration at Cern, the European Center for Nuclear Research, where no scientific article has been published since March 2022.

Advertising

Read more

It is one of the largest international research centers in the world, if not the largest:

and its particle accelerators, straddling France and Switzerland, the place where scientists from all over the world trying to figure out what matter is made of.

However, since the beginning of

, no scientific article has been published as a result of the research carried out there, whereas there are usually about a hundred a year.

In today's #PhotoOfTheWeek, we see a 3D cut of one dipole magnet of the Large Hadron Collider (#LHC), containing two ultrahigh vacuum pipes in which the protons circulate in opposite directions.

Find out more: https://t.co/LvETsqkgdj pic.twitter.com/R2UA2El9GN

— CERN (@CERN) January 18, 2023

Geopolitics before research...

The reason: some members refuse to be credited as co-authors alongside Russian institutes or scientists.

Awaiting a solution, the decision was therefore taken not to put anything to press.

The only departure from this rule is that the results are put online on a pre-publication site popular with the world of research, but which does not benefit from the peer review system of the major scientific journals.

For an organization such as CERN, the case is boring: the organization has often been touted as the place where international cooperation and the pleasure of discovery took precedence over geopolitics.

A reputation that dates back to the Cold War: its laboratories were indeed among the only places where Russian and American scientists could then work together.

#ThrowbackThursday to 1966, in the Proton Synchrotron (PS) Control Room.

The #PS first accelerated protons in 1959, becoming for a short period the world's highest energy particle accelerator.

Today, it is a key component in CERN's accelerator complex.

🔗https://t.co/CTYIjd8nMs pic.twitter.com/aYXfOG6Cxp

— CERN (@CERN) January 19, 2023

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

• Ukraine

• Russia

• Nuclear

• Research

• Technology