Scientists from North Africa, the Middle East and Europe came together in a meeting at CERN to discuss common projects in fields varying from particle physics to water desalination. Robert Klapisch reports.
Back in April 2002 AFAS (the French Association for the Advancement of Science) and the “Club de Marseille” jointly convened “WorldMed 2002”, a meeting that was set up to share knowledge between the north and south regions of the Mediterranean. WorldMed’s aim was to show how concrete projects could advance co-operation between countries with different cultures, thereby providing a much-needed stimulus to the political intergovernmental process. The meeting, which was attended by 850 people, of whom 150 came from North Africa, was a huge success and several projects were begun as a result of contacts initiated among the participants. This success suggested a follow-up in the form of periodic meetings to discuss projects and seek potential synergies. For this purpose, smaller meetings, which would focus on a few selected topics and so be easier to organize and permit an even better opportunity for contacts, seemed a promising concept.
The celebration this year of CERN’s 50th anniversary provided a perfect opportunity for the laboratory, with its distinguished tradition along these lines, to initiate the series by hosting the event on 6-7 May. The chosen topics were the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) project, and computing – all of which are familiar to readers of the CERN Courier – together with two applied topics of considerable and obvious relevance: water and energy.
The conference was opened by Pascal Colombani, chairman of AFAS, who stressed the universal value of science and its ability to build bridges between peoples belonging to different cultures and religions, even in cases where they are in bitter political conflict. John Ellis from CERN introduced the first session with an overview of the LHC programme and its worldwide extent. His talk was followed by specific reports of non-member-state participation from countries in North Africa and the Middle East, with Abdeslam Hoummada from Casablanca, Hafeez Hoorani from the National Center for Physics in Islamabad, and Hessamaddin Arfaei from the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics in Teheran. The status of possible Egyptian participation was also presented by Mohammed Sherif from Cairo. A subsequent round-table discussion included CERN’s director-general, Robert Aymar, together with Ali Chamseddine of Beirut and Giora Mikenberg of Rehovoth.
The overwhelming impression was of the serious and impressive contributions these relative newcomers to the field are bringing to the building of the ATLAS and CMS detectors. In the case of Pakistan and Iran, the legacy of Abdus Salam as the first Muslim Physics Nobel laureate certainly seems to have played a role in persuading the powers-that-be to support such an apparently esoteric field of research. Another interesting aspect is the case of Morocco, where bilateral ties with the French institute IN2P3 have helped to organize and bring to a high standard a consortium of universities that is now a full member of the ATLAS collaboration.
Herwig Schopper, president of the SESAME Council, presented the UNESCO-backed programme for SESAME, a regional synchrotron light facility to be located in Jordan with statutes analogous to those of CERN. It will be based on parts donated from the BESSY I machine at Berlin, which are in the process of being upgraded to make SESAME competitive and up to international standards. The facility should be operational in 2007 and it is remarkable that in just five years a new international organization has been created. Zehra Sayers of Istanbul outlined the scientific programme and Samar Hasnain of the Daresbury Laboratory described the first generation of beam lines. Nasser Hamdam of the United Arab Emirates recounted his former work at the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and talked about his projects for SESAME when it comes on line.
Joining in the subsequent round-table discussion were Abdeslam Hoummada, Abderrahmane Tadjeddine of LURE, Orsay, Jean-Patrick Connerade of Imperial College, London, and Eliezer Rabinovici of Jerusalem. The first example of a regional facility, SESAME will add a south_south dimension to international scientific collaboration. Indeed, as Schopper noted, UNESCO has agreed in principle that other regional scientific centres could be considered in the future – a point that generated tremendous interest in the audience.
Guy Wormser of IN2P3 and Orsay convened a session on “Fighting the digital divide”, in which Michel Spiro, director of IN2P3, first pointed out the dual importance of broadband access. As a tool, broadband would make data analysis a democratic affair, enabling researchers to do physics based on their talent rather than on their geographic location. More generally, bridging the divide could be meant as bridging the gap between people belonging to different cultures or religions, even though some may presently be in political conflict. This is really the prolongation of a 50-year-old CERN tradition.
Fabrizio Gagliardi of CERN then explained the concept of the computing Grid, stressing that it is not only very powerful but also economical. In addition to being necessary to handle the vast amounts of LHC data, it should also have obvious applications in other fields such as meteorology and genomics. Driss Benchekroun of the University of Hassan II, Casablanca, gave the view of a user from Morocco and outlined plans to update IT infrastructure within the Maghreb. These were in fact realized three weeks later when the Moroccan minister inaugurated MARWAN, a wide-area network connecting Moroccan universities among themselves and to Europe. As Dany Vandromme of the Réseau National de Télécommunications pour la Technologie, l’Enseignement et la Recherche (RENATER) explained, this was made possible because the European intra-university network GEANT had been extended to include a link to a point in each country around the Mediterranean, from Casablanca to Beirut. Lorne Levinson of Rehovot and Alberto Santoro from Rio de Janeiro then joined the round-table discussion, appropriately via an Internet videoconference.
For countries in the sun belt, solar energy is a tremendous resource still waiting to be exploited.
Water desalination and reuse is of crucial interest for semi-arid countries, where there is a strong increase in population. For this discussion Miriam Balaban of the European Desalination Association and Azzedine El Midaoui of Ibn Tofa University in Kénitra, Morocco, had assembled a splendid panel of experts. Richard Morris of Glasgow, Corrado Somariva of Abu Dabi, Valentina Lazarova of the Suez Environnement company, Michel Soulié of the Agropolis Association in Montpellier, Bruce Durham of Veolia Water in the UK, and Mohamed Safi of the Ecole national d’ingénieurs in Tunis, presented all aspects of the progress in this field.
The cost of desalination, which only a decade ago was considered out of reach for non oil-rich countries, has fallen dramatically in the past five years. It is now in the region of €0.50-0.85 per tonne for large installations and further progress can be expected. The energy necessary to pump seawater through a semi-permeable membrane is currently 2 kWh for new installations, compared with 5 kWh for installations built in the 1990s, and close to the thermodynamics limit of 0.7 kWh. The focus is now increasingly on environmental aspects such as the safe disposal of the brine and chemicals, on sound water management and on safe recycling of urban and industrial wastewater for irrigation.
For countries in the sun belt, solar energy is a tremendous resource still waiting to be exploited. Augusto Maccari of ENEA, the Italian national agency for new technologies, energy and the environment in Rome, gave a report on how to harness solar energy as high-temperature heat by using concentrating mirrors and storing the heat in a molten salt at 550 °C. This circumvents the discontinuous nature of solar energy so that electricity can be generated on a continuous basis. This development was under the leadership of Carlo Rubbia, president of ENEA, and the talk was also a preview of the inauguration of the “Archimède” pilot facility (20 MW), which took place on 19 May near Syracuse in Sicily.
• The conference was organized by AFAS with the support of CERN, IN2P3, UNESCO, France Telecom, Veolia and Suez.
