CERN opens its doors to its first collaborators from Saudi Arabia
With its physics programmes carried out with the help of the world's largest accelerator complex, CERN has become a magnet for high-energy particle physicists, currently hosting some 7500 scientists from more than 60 countries worldwide. In addition to co-operation with its 20 European member states, the organization has signed formal co-operation agreements with the governments of more than 40 non-member states, as well as memoranda of understanding with a large number of funding agencies that provide support to CERN's user community.
More recently, and in response to the rising interest of a new generation of young scientists from North African and Middle Eastern countries to work in fundamental science, CERN has established formal ties with governments of countries such as Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia, for example, increasingly realizes the importance of higher education as a long-term investment, not only to develop its growing agriculture and industry, but also to allow its own population to participate in fundamental science and research at an international level.
A number of young Saudis have already participated in CERN's Summer Student programme, but more recently CERN's director-general welcomed two of the first long-term visitors from Saudi Arabia, Ibtesam S Badhrees and Nader S Alharbi, who was Saudi Arabia's first visitor to CERN. Both Badhrees and Alharbi are preparing a PhD thesis, under the supervision of the Université de Genève and the Technische Universität in Vienna, respectively (CERN does not award academic degrees). Badhrees works on silicon detectors as a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, while Alharbi is in the study team for a superconducting proton linac, which would serve as the new injector as required for a luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider.
More recently, CERN has agreed with HRH Turki Al-Saud, vice-president of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Riyadh, that Alharbi (also from KACST) will design a model of the drift-tube linac structure at CERN, and then have it manufactured in Saudi Arabia. Later, KACST will provide a full-scale section of the linac structure – a key element of the SPL – as Saudi Arabia's participation in CERN. KACST is a governmental organization that promotes scientific and technological research, in particular in national resources and environment, space science, astronomy and geophysics, information technology, petro-chemistry, atomic energy, mathematics and physics (including particle physics).
This development, only a few months after Saudi Arabia and CERN signed a Co-operation Agreement in Riyadh, opens the prospect of a mutually beneficial participation between Saudi Arabia and CERN, providing valuable opportunities for young Saudi scientists to participate in a cutting-edge fundamental-research endeavour of the international science community hosted by CERN. Moreover, a successful collaboration between Saudi Arabia and CERN will help to build new bridges between the West and the Arab world.