Germany’s high-energy particle physicists have formed a network to increase their international visibility and competitiveness as their field gears up for the start next year of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and, eventually, the International Linear Collider.

The terascale alliance, as it’s known, gets started this month with €25 million ($33 million) over five years from the Helmholtz Association. The German government puts about €150 million annually into CERN. But, says the University of Wuppertal’s Peter Mättig, who is co-coordinator of the alliance with the German Electron Synchrotron’s (DESY’s) Rolf-Dieter Heuer, “Universities get only €12 million per year of federal funds to exploit CERN. This disproportion is in some sense rectified through the alliance.” The alliance will focus on the study of elementary particles, the forces acting between them, and related technological advances.

The alliance encompasses two Helmholtz centers—DESY and the Karlsruhe Research Center—plus the Max Planck Institute...

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