Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi together with a number of government officials and delegates of the University of Malta have accepted CERN’s invitation to go on site in Geneva on Thursday to sign a Memorandum of Understanding.

This understanding will provide the first building blocks to create a Maltese infrastructure that will ensure long term participation of Maltese engineers and scientists in CERN research and innovation projects. Apart from the signing of the Memorandum, a series of discussions will be held to investigate collaboration opportunities further.

Situated on the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva and funded by 20 European member states with a budget of 600 million Euros per year, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (also known as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) performs non-military peaceful fundamental science with the aim of bringing together countries that fought each other in World War II.

Since 1954, its model for borderless cooperation, which precedes the European Union itself, has become a shining example of international collaboration world-wide bringing together 6500 selected physicists, engineers and computer scientists from over 500 institutions of over 80 countries.

It is the largest laboratory of its kind in the world and it is currently preparing the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. To do this, world wide specialists are building the largest and most powerful scientific instrument ever constructed by mankind; a particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is 27 km long and is 100m underground with a price tag of around 6 billion Euros.

If the LHC were linear, its length would be equivalent to the distance between Cirkewwa and Marsaxlokk. This machine together with its four detectors will act like a giant microscope to unlock the secrets of the universe and hence understand better the laws of nature, particularly the composition of matter and the forces that act on it.

This scientific colossus which started in 1984 will be switched on in May 2008. Its cutting edge technology may have profound implications in physics, engineering, computing and medicine ranging from the infinitely small (nanotechnology) to the infinitely large (cosmology).

The most publicly known application originating from CERN is the World Wide Web (WWW) which was invented in 1990 with the intension of making communication between scientists in different countries around the world easier. Being free for all, the WWW has revolutionised the mechanism of communication and commerce on the global level.

Presently, CERN is heading a research effort to develop the 2nd generation WWW known as The Grid. This infrastructure will use networked computers to model a virtual computing architecture that is able to distribute the execution of processes in parallel. This effectively means that in addition to enabling the transfer of data as is the case with the WWW, The Grid will also enable the transfer of processing power. The global effect of The Grid cannot as yet be foreseen but it has already spread to applications in various fields such as: astrophysics, computational chemistry, earth sciences, financial simulation, fusion, high energy physics, bioinformatics, medical imaging and multimedia.

Under normal circumstances, Maltese citizens are not allowed to conduct research at CERN as Malta is not a CERN member state. Not withstanding this, against all odds, Dr Nicholas J. Sammut, a Maltese citizen, is currently a research engineer at CERN responsible for the implementation and optimization of the feed forward control system of the LHC.

He attained this prestigious position thanks to the results he obtained in his Ph.D. which was the fruit of a temporary collaboration agreement that he personally set up between CERN and the Department of Microelectronics (then in Faculty of Engineering and now in the Faculty of ICT) at the University of Malta.

Thanks to this collaboration, Dr. Sammut got access to a cryogenic infrastructure of 25 million Euros which he needed to successfully complete his research project. In addition to this, he also coordinated a team of engineers and technicians to build and characterize an electronic instrument that measures dynamic properties of LHC superconducting magnets. At the time of completion, this instrument was the fastest and most precise of its kind in the world.

At the end of his research campaign, Dr. Sammut’s Ph.D. thesis and other related work cost CERN around 5 million Euros and provided a control system that significantly reduces the machine’s commissioning time, hence saving hundreds of millions of Euros in CERN operation costs. The results are documented in 15 international papers that he published together with specialists from institutions in 17 countries including Italy, Austria, Spain, Bulgaria, France, Romania, Poland, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Tanzania, Russia, USA, India and China.

In view of all this, Dr. Sammut has provided an excellent research and innovation foundation and is proposing a unique opportunity for Malta. Backed by the Maltese Government and the University of Malta, Dr. Sammut is now working on his vision to set up a concrete collaboration with CERN.

This will provide the opportunity for Maltese nationals to undergo top-notch postgraduate studies in an undisputed global nucleus of advanced technical research, development and innovation in the fields of engineering, information technology and the physical sciences.

Such an opportunity would be highly instrumental in attracting foreign investment to Malta in high tech industries as it would provide a very good demonstration of the quality and potential of Maltese personnel. This collaboration project may also result in CERN projects being subcontracted to Malta hence enhancing further the profile of the University and local industry.