CERN Director Rolf-Dieter Heuer announced on August 25 that CERN’s budget will be cut in the amount of CHF330 million (€250 million) for 2011-2015. Heuer said this will not affect the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, though the cuts will slow down the pace of future upgrades and accelerator development.
Heuer was also confident that none of the 2000 or so staff members currently employed by CERN were in danger of losing their jobs.
“All our member states are making significant budget cuts at the national level, and it is difficult to argue why intergovernmental organizations such as CERN should be exempt,” Heuer said in a staff memo. “I firmly believe that basic science budgets must be protected even in, and perhaps particularly in, times of economic downturn. But as a publicly funded body, we have to be realistic.
Especially affected by the cuts is future research into the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), a planned 6.5 GeV electron-positron collider that would be the predecessor to the LHC once it ends operation. While CERN’s €16 million contribution to the project will be upheld, a proposed funding increase has been canceled, as have plans to build an engineering demonstration facility called CLIC0, which would be a necessary step in the CLIC approval process. Money to build the facility will now have to be sought from external funding sources.
“The cuts at CERN are very depressing news,” said Tim Gershon, a particle physicist who works on the LHCb experiment at Warwick University in the UK. “Although CERN’s management has succeeded to find a way to make the savings without any permanent scientific loss, the productivity of the laboratory will be significantly slowed.”
