Scientific Integrity Concerns Raised Over CERN's $16 Billion Trigger System

The Crosetto Foundation for the Reduction of Cancer Deaths has issued a call for scientific transparency and integrity regarding CERN's trigger system development, citing evidence that more than $4 billion in taxpayer funds have already been wasted and over $12 billion more is projected to be wasted on a system that may not meet technical requirements. During the IEEE-NSS-MIC-RTSD 2025 Conference in Yokohama, where over 1,500 scientists gathered to discuss medical imaging and high-energy physics technologies, evidence revealed that the 20-trillion-transistor CERN CMS FPGA-based Level-1 Trigger system—built for data selection at the 2026-2036 High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider—is fundamentally incapable of performing the required number of operations on data arriving every 25 nanoseconds to filter 8 billion events per second without data loss.

Despite several speakers presenting on behalf of CERN's multi-thousand-member collaborations, none were able to state how many basic operations the FPGA system can actually execute per dataset, nor could they provide technical proof that the system can efficiently perform Level-2 trigger algorithms required at the HL-LHC at Level-1. Some researchers claimed the system could meet requirements but did not support those claims with verifiable, reproducible calculations or simulation evidence. This represents a significant escalation from previous CERN scientific and financial missteps, including the AXIAL-PET project in 2010, the 2011 claim that neutrinos travel faster than light, and the 2018 WPET full-body wearable imaging coat weighing over 350 kg.

The foundation is now calling on the European Parliament, national science funding agencies, and media organizations worldwide to freeze additional funding of the CERN FPGA Level-1 Trigger system until scientific questions are answered and inconsistencies resolved. Over 800 million potential readers have access to documentation through more than 5,000 published articles and communications available at https://bit.ly/3HtisQv. From November 3rd to 5th, 2025, over 1,200 copies of a two-page technical document were distributed to conference participants at https://bit.ly/437YX7H, presenting the central scientific question about whether sufficient evidence exists to dismiss the CMS-FPGA system as ineffective.

On the fourth day of the conference, a formal request was submitted to organizers and field leaders to convene a transparent technical workshop, available at https://bit.ly/4nJRsvc, to compare the number of operations per dataset achievable by the CERN FPGA system versus the 3D-Flow system and compare the cost per electronic channel of each architecture. In contrast to the questioned FPGA system, the 3D-Flow architecture, recognized as a breakthrough in 1993, has demonstrated it can perform 2,400 operations per dataset at approximately $13 per channel or 9,600 operations per dataset at approximately $54 per channel, implemented on an ATCA board, with technical details available at https://bit.ly/4qKVar8.