The CERN Director-General, Rolf Heuer, and the Cyprus Minister of Education and Culture, George Demosthenous, have signed an agreement under which Cyprus will become an Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership. The agreement will have to be ratified by the Parliament of Cyprus before coming into force.
Heuer noted that Cypriot physicists had made up a small but very active community at CERN for many years. The new status is expected to enable the country to derive greater benefit from the opportunities offered by CERN, whether through participation in scientific programmes, through industrial development or through education and training.
Demosthenous has said Cyprus considers the agreement to be the cornerstone of its efforts to support and enhance its scientific and research community.
In the early 1990s, Cyprus physicists took part in the L3 experiment at CERN's Large Electron Positron collider before joining the CMS collaboration, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in 1995. Cyprus is the third country to accede to the status of Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership after Israel in 2011 and Serbia earlier in 2012.
