(Bloomberg) -- A donation by former Google chief Eric Schmidt to Europe’s top particle physics lab heralds a new way to fund frontier research just as the West’s technological race with China quickens.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, will use the previously unreported gift of $48 million from the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation to develop AI algorithms to analyze raw data from the lab’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful energy particle accelerator. In 2012, it discovered the Higgs Boson, a particle that’s key to understanding how the universe is built.
Now, CERN needs to reinvest to stay at the cutting edge of particle physics research. By the late 2030s, the LHC is expected to reach the end of its useful life and CERN needs $17 billion from European nations to fund the construction of a much bigger accelerator, known as the Future Circular Collider. But that funding has yet to be secured and, in the meantime, China has proposed its own collider.
Read More: Europe is Designing a New Particle Collider to Take On China
Traditionally, CERN has relied on contributions from its 23 member states and observer partners like the US for funding pure research, while private investors focus on applied research, according to Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN’s director of international relations. That makes the Schmidts’ donation to pure research a private-sector first and may herald a different approach to funding the next collider, she says.
“We’re looking at all sorts of potential partners,” Warakaulle said in an interview with Bloomberg last week. “How we could partner with the EU, private investments potentially.”
At a time when some are questioning the relevance of undertaking a massive new collider that will cost tens of billions, the Schmidt grant is also a reminder of what’s at stake in the geopolitical technology race.
“If China were to start their project before CERN, there is a risk of Europe and the US also, losing the leadership in high-energy particle physics, and also in the technology development that goes with it,” said Warakaulle.
Besides the unraveling of the mysteries of the universe, CERN has also been responsible for a swathe of technological breakthroughs. Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web, which was intended initially as a way for colleagues to share information across borders.
As tensions grow between the US and EU on one side and China on the other in the race to develop everything from microchips to electric vehicles, international collaboration remains critical. The US is a key partner for CERN, with more than 2,000 of the 13,000 researchers who conduct experiments at the lab affiliated with American universities and other institutions, according to Warakaulle.
After Congress voted down a plan in 1993 to fund its own collider in Texas, the US must either throw its weight behind CERN’s proposed FCC or a rival linear collider project in Japan. A US scientific advisory panel in December endorsed the idea of supporting one, but not both projects. That made a joint statement of intent signed last month by the US government and CERN potentially significant.
It’s a commitment to “keeping the leadership in high-energy physics in Europe with the support of the US,” Warakaulle said.
A feasibility study on the new accelerator will end in 2025, with a decision on whether to approve it expected in 2027 or 2028. The new collider would run for about 90 kilometers (56 miles) beneath the fields of France and Switzerland, including the western end of Lake Geneva, dwarfing the existing 27-kilometer underground ring.
They would both work using the same principle, smashing protons at near the speed of light to create conditions similar those that existed just after the Big Bang. But the FCC would produce collisions at much higher energy compared with its predecessor, promising progress in the search for dark energy and dark matter, which scientists hypothesize hold galaxies intact.
As CERN eyes the Chinese challenge to its pre-eminence, it’s ending a cooperation agreement with Russia. That decision, which was taken in mid-2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, will take effect Nov. 30 when the current agreement expires.
That cooperation, which dates back to the Soviet era in the 1960s, has already been curtailed around technologies with potential military applications to ensure CERN complies with EU sanctions against Russia. Still, CERN plans to keep working with Russian scientists not affiliated to Russian institutions so that individuals are not penalized.
“Traditionally CERN has been a bridge builder,” Warakaulle said.
(Updates with decision to end Russian cooperation agreement in third-to-last paragraph)
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