The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) recently celebrated its 60th anniversary at an event attended by official delegates from 35 counties.
 |
Australia was represented at celebrations by Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Mr Quinlan. CERN is home to the world’s largest accelerator, the Larger Hadron Collider. It is so famous that it has even been mentioned in “The Big Bang Theory” scripts.
ANSTO has a long established and highly collaborative relationship with CERN. The first MOU between ANSTO and CERN was signed over 20 years ago. Currently we are collaborating on hadron therapy, accelerator physics and other projects. CERN collaboration provides many benefits to ANSTO including:
- Reciprocal use of equipment (at CERN, OPAL, IER and Australian Synchrotron);
- Joint supervision of research students, staff exchanges; and
- Negotiated arrangements for the exploitation of intellectual property.
ANSTO also acts as the interface between CERN and the Australian accelerator community. Specifically ANSTO is a founding member of the Australian Collaboration for Accelerator Science, participates in the Dark Matter experiment being run by the Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP), collaborators in the Compact Linear Collider, CLIC, project (lead by the University of Melbourne and the Australian Synchrotron) and of course, ANSTO is currently commissioning the Centre for Accelerator Science (a research and user facility).