Austria has stepped back from abandoning Europe’s most important particle physics lab.

Last week Johannes Hahn, the country’s science minister, said his country would withdraw from CERN, which runs the high profile Large Hadron Collider project. The decision was greeted with shock by Austrian physicists (see: Austria quits CERN after 50 years).

Now Chancellor Werner Faymann appears to have overruled Hahn, issuing a statement saying Austria will “remain a reliable partner in the CERN project”.

Reuters sees the u-turn as a spat between Faymann, a social democrat, and Hahn, a conservative. It notes that one national paper is running the story under the headline ‘CERN clash: government in a black hole’.

A petition against the pull out attracted over 30,000 signatures. Austria contributes around 20 million Euros to CERN.

Image: flags of member states fly at CERN’s Meyrin site / CERN