Mark Thomson will take the helm at CERN on the finish of subsequent 12 months. Credit score: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP through Getty
British particle physicist Mark Thomson has been named as the following chief of CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outdoors Geneva, Switzerland.
As CERN’s director basic, Thomson will face main challenges, together with an unsure political panorama amidst the conflict in Ukraine, which has led the lab to break government-level ties with Russia. He may even must restore a faltering consensus across the Future Round Collider (FCC), a brand new 90-kilometre tunnel to host the lab’s flagship experiments all through the remainder of the century. The German authorities, CERN’s largest contributor, expressed scepticism concerning the undertaking earlier this 12 months, and China may beat CERN to the punch with the same undertaking.
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Thomson is not any stranger CERN: he labored at a significant experiment there within the Nineties, and helped to find the Higgs boson on the Giant Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s strongest particle accelerator — in 2012, along with the present director basic Fabiola Gianotti. He’s presently chair of the Science and Expertise Services Council, a UK funding company, and is a consultant on the CERN Council, the board that oversees the laboratory on behalf of its member international locations. He’ll take up the director basic submit on the finish of 2025, when Gianotti’s second consecutive five-year time period is because of finish.
In a press convention on 7 November, each Gianotti and Thomson confused the necessity for continuity, and the significance of the continuing €1.5 billion improve to the 27-kilometre LHC. Thomson additionally reiterated Gianotti’s dedication to construct the FCC. “I’m very a lot aligned with the imaginative and prescient of the present DG,” he advised reporters.
Former CERN council president Ursula Bassler is optimistic about Thomson’s appointment. “He’s an individual who values what the FCC can deliver to CERN, however who can also be conscious of the reservations some folks may need,” says Bassler, who’s a particle physicist at École Polytechnique in Paris. “I believe he’ll actually act in a fairly clear solution to decide.”
Thomson would be the first UK physicist to guide the group for the reason that Nineties. In addition to having labored on the LHC, he has been a co-leader and spokesperson of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment below building in Illinois and South Dakota.
