Investing in scientific research is profitable. During my 2019 conversation with Javier Santaulalla, the physicist and science communicator who participated in the discovery of the Higgs boson, he told me that “CERN develops technologies that Applied in industry. Indeed, one of its fundamental pillars is technology transfer, which consists of seeking applications for what it researches. Patents developed at CERN are open.”
Moreover, Javier noted that “when any kind of work is done, CERN contracts the companies of the countries that finance it. The money that Spain invests in this center is recovered through contracts with industry. In the end, when you do all the calculations, there is a return on investment of 300%. And there is another thing that is very little calculated to me and it is very important: it is very important for people. CERN, knowledge is generated and knowledge is our curiosity. Nourishing.”
The debate over whether it is really worth devoting a portion of government spending to scientific research has been on the table for decades. Scientific organizations that receive public funds support what they do with that money, but CERN has gone one step further: it has estimated that the High-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), the particle accelerator it is currently developing, will bring benefits to society close to double its cost, even without considering the value of potential scientific discoveries.
94% chance of net profit
If the trajectory planned by CERN continues so far, the HL-LHC will be ready by the end of this decade. In 2030. The accelerator will allow beams of particles to pass each other up to 40 million times per second. In the ATLAS and CMS detectors, each of these crossings can produce between 140 and 200 collisions. The amount of data they will generate will be so vast that, as the Spanish physicist Santiago Folgueras explained to me in my conversation with him in December 2023, it will be necessary to create a system that will be able to analyze the data in real time and be able to make decisions about collisions.
The CERN analysis is based on 50,000 simulations and shows a 94% probability of net benefit
This is the purpose of the HL-LHC: to greatly increase the number of collisions compared to previous iterations of the LHC. Illumination measures, in fact, how many possibilities there are Particles collide per unit of area and time. This is measured in reverse femtoburns, so each of them equals 100 billion collisions between protons. Of course, these are trillions on the long scale, so an inverse femtobarron is 100 million million collisions.
In any case, the most interesting thing to note is that the improvements that CERN technicians are introducing at the LHC respond to the need to find cracks in the Standard Model with the aim of expanding our understanding of the world of particles. Some of the questions CERN physicists hope to answer with the HL-LHC are what dark matter is and what its properties are, why neutrinos have mass, and why there is no antimatter in the universe. No doubt these are exciting questions.
To calculate what economic impact the HL-LHC would have, CERN researchers compared two scenarios. The first assumes that the LHC will undergo planned improvements and the second that it will continue to operate in its current configuration until 2030. Its analysis accounts for the costs and benefits attributable to the project. Here comes the startling fact: after 50,000 simulation runs, 94% of them has created a positive balance for society. Interestingly, the main source of socio-economic benefits will be the training of students and young researchers who participate in the development of the accelerator and its experiments.
Picture | Cédric Favero/Photowalk2025 CERN
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