SA-CERN celebrates 15 years of advancing physics in SA

December 2024 marked 15 years since the launch of the South Africa-European Organisation for Nuclear Research (SA-CERN), a programme that has contributed immensely to the growth of the physics community in South Africa.

To mark this remarkable international partnership, the National Research Foundation (NRF) will host an anniversary celebration event at the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (NRF-iThemba LABS)’s Cape Town campus on 20 and 21 January 2025.

The two-day event will feature high-level talks and reflections on the SA-CERN consortium, including a keynote address by the Deputy Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation, Nomalungelo Gina, and presentations from key stakeholders and leading physicists.

Funded by the Department of Science and Innovation and the NRF, the SA-CERN is a national programme launched in December 2008 to advance the country’s physics capabilities. Over the years, the programme has brought many opportunities that allowed South African physicists to contribute to significant global scientific advances, which include the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle in July 2012. Physicists from South Africa and other African countries collaborated worldwide with more than 3,000 physicists from 183 institutions in 38 countries behind the Higgs-Boson discovery. 

A partnership with CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory on the border of Switzerland and France, SA-CERN allows South African physics researchers to research at these premier research facilities. In return, South Africa grows its physics research to become globally competitive and innovative, participates in global science, and attracts the brightest young South Africans into science and technology.

SA-CERN is one of the initiatives through which the NRF facilitates collaboration and access to global, cutting-edge research infrastructure to benefit the local physics discipline. The others are Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy.