Chile strengthens relations with CERN…
The President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, paid a visit to CERN during her three-day tour of Switzerland at the beginning of June. The visit was also the occasion for the signing of a co-operation agreement between CERN and Chile's Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICyT), represented by the commission's president, Vivian Heyl.
During the visit, Michelle Bachelet and her delegation were greeted by CERN's director-general, Robert Aymar, and shown the ATLAS experiment and the LHC. Bachelet also took time to meet the Chilean community working at CERN, comprising several physicists in the Theory Group and the ATLAS experiment.
The co-operation agreement between CERN and CONICyT provides a framework for the long-term participation of students and scientific and technical staff from Chile's universities and research institutes in CERN's experimental programme. At the same time, Pedro Pablo Rosso, rector of the Pontificia Universidad Católica, and José Rodriguez, rector of the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, also signed agreements with ATLAS spokesman Peter Jenni relating to co-operation between the experiment and their two universities.
…and Mexican research council signs MOU
José Antonio de la Peña, the deputy-director for science of the main Mexican funding agency Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), came to CERN on 14–15 May. His visit included the LHC experiments and the CLIC facility, and it concluded with his signing a memorandum of understanding together with Robert Aymar, CERN's director-general, for Mexican contribution to the ALICE experiment.
A major part of the visit centred on discussions between de la Peña and leaders of the ALICE collaboration. The bulk of Mexican effort at CERN is concentrated on the ALICE experiment at the LHC, with about 35 people (half of them students) in two detector projects, the V0 (a forward detector) and the cosmic-ray trigger array ACORDE. De la Peña underlined his satisfaction with the ACORDE detector, which has been conceived, completely designed and produced by the groups from Cinvestav, BUAP (Puebla) and ICN-UNAM, under the project leader Arturo Fernández from BUAP. He also expressed the wish to extend the collaboration of CONACyT to other areas at CERN, mainly in connection with the training of Mexican undergraduate and postdoctorate researchers.