How fundamental science is changing our world

Fundamental science benefits society in many ways, from generating knowledge about how our universe works, to enabling unexpected and often transformative applications. Particle accelerators have been at the centre of many of the most advanced research infrastructures for decades. They have enabled many discoveries, such as the Higgs boson, and also led to the development of technologies that have changed our lives.

Future particle accelerators are expected to have a similarly bold impact on science and society. To showcase and the discuss the technologies that are currently being developed within the global Future Circular Collider (FCC) study, almost a thousand researchers and industrialists from across Europe, university students and high school children participated in “Particle Colliders – Accelerating Innovation”, an international science symposium I hosted in Liverpool on Friday 22nd March 2019.

In January 2019, CERN published the conceptual design report for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a potential successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which aims to be four times larger and seven times more powerful, enabling it to reach unprecedented energy levels.

Developing the design concept for such a potential future research infrastructure is not just about the science they would enable; it also requires us to drive technological progress that can benefit our everyday lives. However, making the connection between fundamental science and economic value is often difficult to quantify, but there have been a number of outstanding examples of where this has happened. Among the benefits to wider society are medical imaging techniques, advances in proton beam cancer therapy and other ways to diagnose and repair tissue damage. In fact the World Wide Web, which celebrated its 30th birthday this month, was invented at CERN to support particle physics experiments and is now an integral part of our daily lives. Further applications are expected to emerge in the coming years I am pleased to announce our brand-new film Busy Bees and Mighty Magnets (https://youtu.be/lGImsJmwiXo ).

The Symposium in Liverpool was live-streamed to institutions across Europe and the talks from world-leading researchers are now available to watch via the event website. The event also featured an industry exhibition with dozens of companies from various sectors, a careers fair that explained job opportunities to current physics students, as well as a number of interactive demonstrations hundreds of high school students.

A highlight was a demonstration of the world’s first interactive ‘Tactile Collider’, which uses touch together with real sounds from the LHC to create an immersive experience. Delegates also had the chance to play proton football and interact with visualisations of themselves in two different universes within CERN’s interactive Large Hadron Collider Tunnel, which made its UK premiere at the symposium.

A technology-transfer workshop followed in the afternoon for around 100 industrialists and researchers from across Europe to develop ideas together to solve global challenges. It further strengthened links between industry and academia, and paved the way for future collaborative projects.

Oxford-based Adaptix, one of the partners in the pan-European research and training network OMA (Optimization of Medical Accelerators), began life when a problem in search of a solution met a solution in search of a problem.

Working on laser-driven particle accelerators at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Adaptix co-founder Dr Gil Travish saw the potential to use the emitter arrays he had developed in ‘gene-chips’, to look for DNA unravelling. It was by chance that he was introduced to Mark Evans, who had been looking for a technology to bring radiology to the field and to the bedside. The two men met in a coffeehouse and began a collaboration that is now bringing a product to market.

The workshop at the symposium aimed to catalyse these types of interaction. Gil mentioned to me: “It is encouraging to see how a concept born out of the pursuit of basic research—advanced particle accelerators—could be adapted to a very applied field: medical imaging."

“We hope to see our product on the market soon, bringing 3D imaging to all the places where today clinicians can only provide 2D imaging. We think this technology will touch everyone’s lives and improve healthcare.”

It was a pleasure to host this unique event in Liverpool and I am truly grateful to the many colleagues who contributed and made this such a big success. You can find all talks and a lot of further information on the event website: indico.cern.ch/event/747618