China (People's Republic of)
Number of CERN users
95 (January 2012)
CERN contact
Participation in CERN Experiments
Participation in CERN Accelerator Projects
LCI/CTF3
WLCG Participation
Tier-2 centre
Co-operation between CERN and China began in the 1970s, initially in accelerator technology and in theoretical physics, soon followed by participation in CERN’s experimental physics programme (ISR-I4/SFM, ALEPH, NA-49 and L3). For the L3 experiment at LEP, the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics provided BGO crystals in the 1980s and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) worked on the hadron calorimeter.
In 1981, CERN and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding, followed by an International Co-operation Agreement in 1998. In 1992, CERN and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) signed a new International Co-operation Agreement.
In the mid 1990s, IHEP and Peking University joined the CMS collaboration, and subsequently IHEP and the University of Science and Technology (UST), the Universities of Shandong and Nanjing signed up with ATLAS. On behalf of the Chinese funding agencies the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) signed the Memoranda of Understanding for the collaboration with CMS and ATLAS. The Tsinghua University joined LHCb, while the Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan and the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE) signed up with ALICE.
In addition, China is participating in the LCG project. An LCG Tier-2 centre was established at IHEP. Recently Tsinghua University took steps to collaborate in the CLIC study.