Practical Benefits of Particle Physics #4

Fostering International Collaboration

The size, cost, and complexity of particle physics detectors and data sets often requires the collaboration of multiple nations from around the world. Ideally, this means that scientists will sometimes learn to cooperate and communicate more effectively than their governments.

• Though not strictly a particle physics experiment, the SESAME light source uses the same accelerator technology as particle physics. It is located in Jordan, and its users include scientists from Israel, Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and many other nations.
• At one time, when I was a resident of the office that the Ohio State BaBar group shares with Colorado State, the other residents included students and postdoctoral researches from Israel, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy. The experiment is sponsored by ten nations and includes scientists from many more.
• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an international scientific enterprise many times the size of BaBar. Symmetry magazine notes that more "than 7000 scientists from 85-plus countries are involved in the LHC collider and its six experiments at the European laboratory CERN. They include some 750 scientists from US universities and national laboratories"