Estonia’s parliament has recently approved special funding from the country’s state budget of some €100,000 annually for the period 2004-2010. The funds are to boost scientific co-operation between Estonia and CERN, which to date involves the following Estonian research institutions: the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, the University of Tartu (notably its Institute of Physics), the Technical University of Tallinn and the Observatory of Tartu.
Estonia’s co-operation with CERN will now focus on a number of objectives: consolidation of participation in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); participation in LHC Grid Computing and other information-technology projects at CERN; collaboration with research groups at CERN in theoretical and experimental particle physics, as well as material sciences; and the creation of an Estonian graduate school, with students trained at CERN. The school already plans to send six Estonian students to participate in CERN’s Summer Student Programme in 2004.
