Prof. David Harel, President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Prof. Yoseph Mekori, Chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education, paid an official visit to CERN, the world’s leading laboratory for the study of elementary particles in Geneva, Switzerland, on Thursday, February 16, 2023.

Israel became an observer of CERN in 1990 and received full membership status in 2014. The Academy’s National Committee for High Energies, headed by Prof. Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University, represents Israel at CERN and leads Israel’s experimental scientific work there. The President of the Academy and the Minister of Science and Technology appoint the committee’s members.

During the visit, Prof. Harel and Prof. Mekori met with Prof. Eliezer Rabinovici, who served for decades as head of the National Committee for High Energies and was elected president of the CERN Council in 2021. They toured the facility’s various units, as well as the visitors’ center of the ATLAS detector, the largest particle detector, which is installed inside the Large Hadron Collider. At 27 kilometers long, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator at CERN, and the location where the Israeli scientists’ research is conducted.

 

President of the CERN Council, Prof. Eliezer Rabinovici, at a meeting with the Israeli delegation. Photo courtesy of CERN