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Following the international open call launched in November 2025, Arts at CERN and the Nobel Prize Museum are pleased to announce that Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė has been selected as the recipient of the Collide Stockholm residency award. The jury also decided to award two Honorary Mentions to artists Morehshin Allahyari and Wendi Yan.
Collide is Arts at CERN’s flagship residency programme. Each edition is organised in partnership with a leading cultural institution in one of the CERN Member States. Inaugurated in 2025, Collide Stockholm is a two-month international art residency initiated by CERN and the Nobel Prize Museum, which invites artists to reflect on the cultural and societal impact of fundamental science and advanced technologies. The open call attracted a total of 908 applications from artists in 89 countries.
In autumn 2026, Škarnulytė will spend one month at CERN followed by one month at the Nobel Prize Museum to develop a new artwork with the support of the curatorial teams of both institutions.
At CERN, she will begin her project Memory of the Unseen. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of infrastructures that mediate between the visible and the invisible, the human and the post-human, the present and deep time. In dialogue with scientists at CERN, she will engage with event reconstruction, decay signatures, detector sensitivity and the temporal behaviour of experimental data, focusing on what she describes as “thresholds”.
Blending 3D scans, speculative visual sequences and atmospheric sound, she will explore “fragile spaces where the invisible becomes briefly perceptible”: environments such as detector caverns, tunnels, magnetic infrastructures and data-processing systems that enable the detection of particle interactions.
At the Nobel Prize Museum, she will investigate the institution as a site where narratives of scientific discovery enter the cultural sphere and collective memory, through research into archival materials, exhibition strategies and historical narratives.
Chaired by Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN, the jury was composed of Clara Åhlvik, Director of Exhibitions at the Nobel Prize Museum; Daniel Birnbaum, art curator and Professor of Philosophy at the Städelschule in Frankfurt; Ulf Danielsson, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics; and Helga Timko, an accelerator physicist at CERN and a member of the CERN Cultural Board.
In recognition of the outstanding quality of the proposals, the jury decided to award two Honorary Mentions to the artists Morehshin Allahyari and Wendi Yan.
Morehshin Allahyari’s project, which reconfigures computational machines by drawing on automata from the Islamic Golden Era, revisits histories of technological innovation and mechanical intelligence with imaginative potential and aesthetic vision.
Wendi Yan engages with transcultural narratives in science and technology and with the possibilities of worldbuilding and gaming as poetic tools for historical inquiry and knowledge making. Her transdisciplinary project bridges scholarly depth with current techno-scientific discourses through emerging digital aesthetics.
“Arts at CERN was delighted by the extraordinary number and breadth of the proposals” said Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN. “We look forward to welcoming Emilija Škarnulytė to CERN and to developing this new edition of Collide with the Nobel Prize Museum with a view to providing a fertile ground to reflect on our respective quests for knowledge by fostering artistic visions as a means of inquiry. We express our sincere gratitude to all the artists who applied for this programme.”
“The jury deliberation session at the Nobel Prize Museum was an inspiring gathering that generated rich discussions, confirming the remarkable potential of this new collaboration with Arts at CERN. We congratulate the awardees and look forward to accompanying Emilija Škarnulytė in her exploration of our museum, its history and the stories it preserves,” said Clara Åhlvik, Director of Exhibition at the Nobel Prize Museum.
jharma Tue, 04/28/2026 - 11:23 Publication Date Tue, 04/28/2026 - 11:21On 20 April 2026, another important milestone was reached for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC) project, with the start of the electrical powering of the 95-metre-long test stand called the Inner Triplet String (IT String). Following its successful cryogenic cooldown to 1.9 K (‑271.3 °C) a few weeks ago, it will be powered up progressively, circuit by circuit, over the next few weeks.
The IT String is a full-scale test stand that replicates an entire region of the future HiLumi LHC, set to enter into operation in 2030. This ground-breaking accelerator will increase the number of particle collisions (called “luminosity”) by a factor of ten, vastly increasing the volume of physics data available to researchers. Transforming the LHC into a high-luminosity accelerator requires a four-year intensive programme of work that will start this summer. During this time, innovative technologies will be installed in the LHC tunnel, including novel magnet systems – the inner triplet beam-focusing magnets – and the associated complex infrastructure. The test stand is designed to validate this major set of key technologies for the HiLumi LHC.
The IT String brings together all the systems required to operate under nominal conditions, including, of course, the inner triplet magnets, but also powering equipment, in particular an innovative superconducting link, cryogenics, protection systems, the magnet alignment infrastructure and other auxiliary systems. Together, these components form 17 circuits.
“The IT String is the result of many years of research and development and incorporates a wealth of technological innovations. Finally reaching the point where, step by step, each of the complete circuits is switched on marks a decisive milestone for CERN’s HiLumi LHC and for all the teams involved in the project,” explains Markus Zerlauth, HiLumi LHC Project Leader.
The High Order Corrector (HOC) circuits include the very first components to be powered. They are designed to correct the beam parameters and the magnetic field errors of the quadrupole magnets in the inner triplet circuits. The powering will then be carried out progressively, following the same sequence as that planned for the accelerator hardware commissioning of the final HiLumi LHC machine. Initial steps will focus on verification of the powering infrastructure and protection systems, before gradual advancement to the more complex circuits. In the coming weeks, the programme will integrate more components and reach higher levels of current. This staged approach will see the powering of the main inner triplet magnets in June and of the whole installation later this summer, marking a key step in the validation of the full system under operational conditions.
“This project, up to this stage, has been an exciting journey, bringing together members from all departments at CERN. The installation was not without challenges, but each difficulty provided valuable lessons that have since been integrated into improvements of the design and installation procedures,” says Marta Bajko, head of the IT String project. “One of the major issues encountered during installation of the IT String was a leak caused by a component that required further optimisation. Addressing this problem led to a six-month programme of work, which was successfully completed on schedule, allowing us to start testing the powering this week.”
The successful execution of this programme will demonstrate the readiness of the HiLumi LHC inner triplet systems and their associated technologies, paving the way for their installation in the LHC during the imminent Long Shutdown 3 and for the subsequent exciting era of high-luminosity physics.
anschaef Fri, 04/24/2026 - 10:23 Byline Anaïs Schaeffer Publication Date Fri, 04/24/2026 - 10:21Originally derived from a technology developed to explore the fundamental nature of the Universe, Medipix3 technology now powers a medical scanner that is on track to benefit an increased number of patients. MARS Bioimaging Ltd has received 510(k) clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its portable photon-counting CT scanner for upper-limb imaging, allowing the system to enter the US health sector and enable broader clinical adoption.
Medipix technology is based on hybrid pixel detectors, which were originally designed at CERN for particle detection in high-energy physics experiments. This technology was adapted to create the Medipix family of pixel detector readout chips, enabling a new approach to medical imaging.
Unlike conventional CT (computed tomography) systems – which combine X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce a 3D image – photon-counting technology measures individual X-ray photons and their energy. This produces detailed, three-dimensional images that help clinicians to distinguish between different types of tissue and materials, better informing their decision making. John Carrino, M.D., Vice Chairman for Radiology and Imaging at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who is involved in clinical trials with MARS Bioimaging, noted: “Photon-counting CT is going to be the future of CT for medical imaging.”
Designed for use outside traditional hospital radiology departments, the MARS Bioimaging Extremity Scanner System can bring this advanced imaging capability into community and point-of-care environments, including outpatient clinics and sports medicine settings. Its recent FDA clearance will not only allow more patients to benefit across the United States, but also help support uptake internationally.
Anthony Butler, Chief Technology Officer at MARS Bioimaging Ltd, recalled: “Phil Butler [his father] had worked at CERN and convinced me that some of the new detectors would be useful in medicine by improving access to high-quality imaging. Twenty years later, with the support of the Medipix Collaboration, we are starting to have a significant impact.”
CERN played an important role in helping move photon-counting techniques from the laboratory to the clinic by hosting a series of workshops. These brought together scientists, engineers, clinicians and industrial partners to develop and exchange expertise and explore new applications. Rafael Ballabriga, Spokesperson for the Medipix3 Collaboration, said: “It is very rewarding to see a technology developed initially for high-energy physics go on to benefit society through medical application.”
A public summary of the 8th Workshop on Medical Applications of Spectroscopic X-ray Detectors will be presented by Anthony Butler at CERN on Friday, 24 April, offering an overview of progress made in the development of photon-counting CT technology.
ehatters Thu, 04/23/2026 - 17:05 Byline Feza Tankut Publication Date Thu, 04/23/2026 - 17:01One of the biggest open questions in particle physics today is how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. This “self-coupling” could help explain the evolution of the early Universe and the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. To try to shed light on this fundamental interaction, the ATLAS Collaboration has recently studied one of the “golden” decay channels of a pair of Higgs bosons, where one Higgs boson decays into two photons and the other into a pair of bottom quarks.
By combining the entire LHC Run 2 dataset (2015–2018) and a partial Run 3 dataset (2022–2024), the ATLAS team has significantly enhanced the statistical power of the analysis of this decay channel. The result, just published in Physics Letters B, marks the first ATLAS measurement based on over 300 inverse femtobarns (fb⁻¹) of proton–proton collision data, where one inverse femtobarn corresponds to approximately 100 trillion collisions.
Studying this decay channel is particularly challenging due to the extremely rare nature of Higgs boson pair production – predicted to occur once in a trillion proton–proton collisions – and the significant background from Standard Model processes that mimic this decay mode. To overcome these challenges, ATLAS physicists used advanced data analysis techniques, such as machine learning, to help to isolate the decay signal from the background.
As a result of these advancements and the addition of the partial Run 3 dataset, the ATLAS researchers set more stringent limits than they did before on the signal strength (the observed signal divided by the Standard Model prediction) and two key interaction parameters. These are the magnitude of the Higgs boson’s self-coupling divided by its Standard Model prediction, limited to be between −1.6 and 6.6, and the interaction strength between two Higgs bosons and two vector bosons (W or Z bosons) divided by its Standard Model prediction, limited to be between −0.5 and 2.6.
The results underscore the ATLAS Collaboration’s growing ability to explore Higgs boson pair production in this golden decay channel. They also lay the foundation for future measurements of the Higgs boson’s self-coupling – key to understanding the evolution of the Universe after the Big Bang. With the full Run 3 dataset soon to be available and the High-Luminosity LHC on the horizon, ATLAS is well positioned to push these studies even further – sharpening our understanding of the Higgs boson and exploring potential signs of physics beyond the Standard Model.
Read more on the ATLAS website.
ehatters Wed, 04/22/2026 - 10:17 Byline ATLAS collaboration Publication Date Wed, 04/22/2026 - 10:10
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