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Earth Day has been celebrated on 22 April since 1970, and in 2025 its theme is “our power, our planet”. This reflects the increasing need to manage energy globally and CERN, for its part, is wholly committed to improving its energy performance. CERN was one of the first scientific laboratories to obtain ISO 50001 certification for energy management, in February 2023. ISO 50001 is the benchmark international standard for implementing systems and processes to continually improve energy performance. It entails setting up, monitoring and improving an energy management system, in line with CERN’s Energy Policy and the relevant legislation.
Each year, a surveillance audit checks for compliance and continuous improvements. Following a successful audit in 2024, CERN has now passed the 2025 surveillance audit carried out by the French Association for Standardisation, AFNOR. The audit explored a range of topics across CERN, from cryogenics to cooling and ventilation, from human resources to health and safety. No nonconformities were identified, and many strengths were singled out.
“The level of maturity of CERN’s energy management system was particularly highlighted in the 2025 audit,” explains CERN’s energy coordinator, Nicolas Bellegarde. “CERN was able to demonstrate improvements to energy performance through a large number of technical and organisational actions, as well as through the day-to-day operations of the various teams.”
Each year, CERN strives to improve energy management by deploying a strategy based on three pillars: to keep the energy required for its activities to a minimum, to improve energy efficiency, and to recover waste energy.
The 400 kV electrical substation on the CERN Prévessin site. (Image: CERN)A good example is the new data centre in Prévessin, which was inaugurated in 2024 and is designed to provide up to 12 megawatts of computing power, responding to the computing needs of CERN. A data centre’s energy efficiency is measured by its “power usage effectiveness” (PUE), with numbers closest to 1.0 being the most efficient. New data centres achieve PUEs of between 1.2 and 1.4. and large data centres typically average 1.5. But the Prévessin data centre is instead targeting 1.1. In addition, the new building is equipped with an efficient heat-recovery system that will contribute to heating all the buildings on the Prévessin site.
Also in 2024, CERN signed three power purchase agreements (PPAs) with French energy providers so that the construction of the offsite solar power farms can begin and 140 GWh/year can be provided by renewable sources from 2027, corresponding to about 10% of CERN’s annual electricity consumption during accelerator operation years.
Energy management is part of the Laboratory’s commitment to environmentally responsible research. Find out more here: home.cern/about/what-we-do/environmentally-responsible-research
anschaef Tue, 04/22/2025 - 09:32 Byline Kate Kahle Publication Date Tue, 04/22/2025 - 09:31I concluded my previous Accelerator Report with: “…if the two-week delay holds, the 2025 commissioning may once again fall during the Easter weekend. Have we discovered a new constant of nature?”, referring to the delay caused by a leak in the water-cooling system of the ATLAS argon calorimeter.
But, as is often the case at CERN when challenges arise, everyone stepped up. ATLAS mobilised its resources and the other experiments offered their support to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Thanks to this efficient coordination and dedicated work, the expected two-week delay was reduced to just four days.
So, the start of the LHC beam commissioning during Easter is not a new constant of nature after all.
In the early hours of 8 April, the final preparations were under way: the ATLAS access shaft was being closed, the final checks were being carried out on the LHC machine and experts were gathering in the CERN Control Centre (CCC) to contribute to beam commissioning and to witness protons circulating in the LHC for the first time in 2025.
As the LHC team gathered for the 9 o’clock briefing, the teams working on the injectors (PS Booster, PS and SPS) performed their final checks on the meticulously prepared single-bunch LHC beam – the result of weeks of careful tuning. At 9.30 a.m., the LHC engineer in charge gave the SPS team a heads-up that the first beam injection into the LHC was just minutes away. At 9.39 a.m., protons were transferred from the SPS and injected into the LHC at Point 2, in front of the ALICE detector. This marked the start of the beam 1 (clockwise) threading process.
Threading the beam involves injecting a single low-intensity bunch into the machine and guiding it through a sector of the LHC. Horizontal and vertical beam positions are measured and corrected and the process is repeated, allowing the beam to travel further each time until it completes a full circumference and circulates.
Not much later, at 11.00 a.m., the same process was initiated for beam 2 (anti-clockwise), with the first protons injected at Point 8 in front of the LHCb detector. Once each beam had been made to circulate individually, both beams were successfully injected and were circulating simultaneously by midday.
These first injections are always an exciting moment. To an outsider, they might seem like the main event of the LHC beam commissioning. But while they are indeed an essential milestone, they are just the beginning, a small part of the complex process required to prepare beams for physics.
LHC page 1 on 8 April at 12.03 p.m. Beam 1 (blue line) was the first to circulate, at 10.40 a.m. At 11.43 a.m., beam 2 (red line) was also circulating. Just after noon, both beams were injected and circulated together in the LHC for the first time in 2025. The real beam commissioning work had started. (Image: CERN)Since 8 April, teams of experts, together with the LHC engineers in charge, have been working around the clock to tune the machine and address issues that only become visible once beam is circulating.
Despite the four-day delay to the start of beam commissioning, the schedule remains on track. The first collisions with stable beams are still scheduled for 2 May, and the start of meaningful physics with around 1200 bunches for 19 May.
Meanwhile, physics at ISOLDE, n_TOF and the East Area is well under way and the SPS beam commissioning was completed successfully. On 4 April, the beamline physicists took over the SPS beam to commission the nearly 6 km of beamlines between the SPS and the various experiment zones in the SPS North Area, where the first experiments made use of the beam on 14 April.
Further upstream in the accelerator chain, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) completed its hardware commissioning on 3 April, several days ahead of schedule, and the first antiprotons were injected shortly after.
The AD display on 8 April. The red line shows the AD beam momentum ramping down from 3.5 GeV/c to 5 MeV/c. The green line represents the number of antiprotons throughout the deceleration process, while the black line is a “golden” reference to the 2024 performance. An amazing result after only a few days, but some work remains to be done to match the 2024 performance. (Image: CERN)In the antiproton complex, antiprotons are produced by bombarding the AD target with a high-energy proton beam from the PS. These antiprotons are first decelerated down to 5 MeV by the AD, and then further slowed down to 100 keV by ELENA. Thanks to its dedicated H-⁻ ion source, ELENA was able to get a head start. The AD/ELENA team began beam commissioning using H- ions well before antiprotons were available, allowing significant progress to be made in advance.
Now that antiprotons are available from the AD, both the AD and ELENA have successfully completed deceleration cycles. Notably, ELENA has already extracted bunches containing 10 million antiprotons, a number that, in 2024, was only reached by mid-summer and constituted record bunch intensities at that time. Physics in the antiproton complex is officially scheduled to begin on 5 May but, with the rapid progress made so far, an earlier start is likely (but remains to be confirmed).
anschaef Wed, 04/16/2025 - 11:33 Byline Rende Steerenberg Publication Date Wed, 04/16/2025 - 11:31CERN’s photo archives contain hundreds of thousands of images, among them hidden gems. Many of them are beautiful, while others are surprising or downright bizarre. For a long time, these photos lay forgotten in filing cabinets, stored on film or slides. Since 2014, a major digitisation project has been under way, bringing these pieces of the Laboratory’s heritage back into the light.
“Digging through the archives, I was drawn to these black-and-white shots, some of which are exceptional,” explains Renilde Vanden Broeck, who has been working on the photo archive database for several years. “I thought it was a shame that no one ever saw these testimonies to CERN’s rich past.” That’s how, beginning a few years ago, these photos came to be posted regularly on CERN’s Instagram and Facebook accounts, with the hashtag #ThrowbackThursday. And Renilde has since created a collection of the most beautiful among them.
Then came the idea of putting some of the photos on display for the public in Geneva, and the Bains des Pâquis seemed the perfect location. “Pâquis attracts all kinds of people. It’s the ideal place to grab the attention of those who might not normally think of coming to CERN and to inspire them to visit the Science Gateway,” says Renilde.
The exhibition, which was produced in collaboration with writers and graphic designers from the Education, Communication and Outreach group, includes around forty of these photographs from the 1950s to the 1980s, telling the story of CERN’s scientific and human endeavour: incredible machines, ultra-precise work and collaboration between scientists, as well as scenes of joy and whimsy, passion and humour – in short, everything that defined CERN back then and continues to do so today.
Explorers of science, past and present
Jetée des Bains des Pâquis, Geneva
Admission free
18 April to 22 May 2025
Practical information
If you’d like to journey further into CERN’s history, you can explore the CERN photo archive database and admire Renilde’s collection of images.
You’ll see that a lot of information is still missing in the database. You can help to improve it by providing additional information or captions. Click on the “Suggest a caption” link on the right above your chosen photo.
If you have any interesting historical photographs relating to CERN, please send them to Heritage.Committee@cern.ch, observing these rules if possible:
Thank you!
If all that still doesn’t satisfy your appetite for CERN’s history, why not browse the articles in the CERN70 series, published in 2024 to mark the Laboratory’s 70th anniversary.
anschaef Tue, 04/15/2025 - 10:54 Byline Corinne Pralavorio Publication Date Wed, 04/16/2025 - 10:52The discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN in 2012 opened a new window on the innermost workings of the Universe. It revealed the existence of a mysterious, ancient field with which elementary particles interact to acquire their all-important masses. This process is governed by a delicate mechanism called electroweak symmetry breaking, which was first proposed in 1964 but remains among the least understood phenomena of the Standard Model of particle physics. To probe this critical mechanism in the evolution of the Universe, physicists require a very large dataset of high-energy particle collisions.
Last week, at the Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS collaboration brought physicists a step closer to understanding the nature of the electroweak symmetry-breaking mechanism. Using the full proton-proton collision dataset from LHC Run 2, which was collected at an energy of 13 TeV from 2015 to 2018, the team presented the first evidence of a key process involving the W boson – one of the mediators of the weak force.
In the Standard Model of particle physics, the electromagnetic and the weak interactions are two sides of the same coin, unified as the electroweak interaction. It is thought that the electroweak interaction prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, when the Universe was extremely hot. But the symmetry between the two interactions somehow got broken, since the carriers of the weak interaction, the W and Z bosons, are observed to be massive, whereas the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic interaction, is massless. The breaking of this symmetry is realised in the Standard Model through the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism. The discovery of the Higgs boson provided the first experimental confirmation of this mechanism. The next step is to measure the properties of the new particle, in particular how strongly it interacts with other elementary particles. These measurements are currently under way, with the aim of confirming that the masses of elementary matter particles are also the result of their interaction with the BEH field.
But the BEH mechanism also makes other predictions. Two processes in particular need to be measured to confirm that the mechanism is indeed as the Standard Model predicts: the interaction between longitudinally polarised W or Z bosons and the interaction of the Higgs boson with itself. While studies of Higgs self-interaction are expected to be possible at the earliest with the High-Luminosity LHC, which is due to begin operation in 2030, and will require a future collider to be pinned down in detail, first studies of the scattering of longitudinally polarised gauge bosons should be possible earlier.
For particles, polarisation refers to the way in which their spin is oriented in space. Longitudinally polarised particles have their spin aligned with the direction of their momentum, something that is only possible for particles that have mass. The existence of longitudinally polarised W and Z bosons (WL and ZL) is a direct consequence of the BEH mechanism, and the way in which these states interact with each other is therefore a very sensitive test of how the electroweak symmetry is broken. Studying this interaction should allow physicists to tell whether the symmetry breaking is realised via the minimal BEH mechanism or whether some new physics beyond the Standard Model is involved. The new ATLAS result provides a first glimpse of this elusive process.
The WL-WL interaction can be probed experimentally in proton-proton collisions by studying a process called vector-boson scattering (VBS). The VBS process can be visualised as a quark in each of the incoming protons emitting a W boson and those two W bosons interacting with each other, producing a pair of W or Z bosons. VBS can be identified by looking for collisions containing the decay products of the two bosons together with the two quarks that participated in the interaction forming two jets of particles going in opposite directions.
The new ATLAS analysis targets collisions in which the two W bosons decay into an electron or a muon and their respective neutrinos. In order to suppress backgrounds, mostly from processes involving top-quark pair production, both leptons are required to be of the same electrical charge. The experimental signature is thus a pair of same-charge leptons (electron-electron, muon-muon or electron-muon), two particle “jets” with opposite directions produced by the decays of the quarks, and missing energy coming from the undetectable neutrinos.
Once candidates for the VBS process are selected, the polarisation of the W bosons has to be determined. This is very challenging and can be done only via a thorough analysis of correlations between the directions of the reconstructed electrons and muons and the properties of other particles produced in the interaction. Dedicated neural networks have been trained to distinguish between transverse and longitudinal polarisation and made it possible to extract the final result: evidence with the statistical significance of 3.3 sigma that at least one of the two W bosons was longitudinally polarised.
“This measurement is a milestone in the studies of the core physics value via polarised boson interactions in vector-boson scattering processes,” says Yusheng Wu, the ATLAS Standard Model group convener. “It marks a path towards the eventual study of longitudinally polarised boson scattering using LHC Run-3 and HL-LHC data.”
Read more in the supporting ATLAS note and physics briefing.
angerard Thu, 04/10/2025 - 13:23 Byline ATLAS collaboration Publication Date Thu, 04/10/2025 - 13:21“Weze-Xupe”, “a^2+b**2=sqr(c)”, “IXdKKaspdd!” or “dogs+F18” have long been the state of art for passwords – using a mixture of capital and lower-case letters, symbols and numbers and definitely not using any word from a dictionary of your preferred language. The more gibberish the better. Only such passwords were able to evade being successfully brute-forced using dictionaries, rainbow tables or other techniques. The only limiting factors were the computing power on the attacker’s side and the numbers of attempts. And thanks to Moore’s law, they got more and more power over time. Time to adapt again!
CERN already gave up the annual password change a while ago, making life easier and avoiding idiotic password changes from “MyGenialPassword2022” to “MyGenialPassword2023”, opting to monitor instead for passwords that have been publicly exposed. In addition, with the introduction of 2-factor authentication (2FA), CERN primary and secondary accounts got another well-needed layer of protection. Actually, by now, more than 45 000 CERN accounts are subject to 2FA protection, and that protection will soon be extended to remote logins to the “LXPLUS” interactive Linux cluster and when using the internet-facing Windows Terminal Servers (“CERNTS”).
Thus, the time has come to take another step forward. Let’s give up the complexity rules (letters, symbols, numbers) and go for long passwords, i.e. “passphrases”, instead. Long but easy to remember. Like a poem or refrain, like a place you especially like or an episode in your life. Like “Fais de ta vie un rêve, et de ton rêve une réalité” (Saint-Exupéry), “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately Pleasure Dome decree” (Frankie Goes to Hollywood), “ThisIsAVeryGoodPassword” (for the self-confident), “They call it a Royale with cheese” (for film fanatics), “C’est quoi ce b***?” (for IT guys), but also “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” (for the indecisive ones). Even better, take advantage of your presumable multi-nationality: use a passphrase in your native language or, even better, mix multiple languages, use Frenglish, Spanglish or any other combination (for example, “Le boss veut un feedback asap”). The longer the phrase, the harder to guess, the harder to crack. At least for the time being.
The aim for 2025 and 2026 is to gradually replace all current passwords by passwords of at least 15 characters (following the NIST 800-63b standard). For those that already meet that criterion, nothing will change. All other users will be asked over the course of time (and depending on their end-of-contract date) to be creative and adapt their current choice to something longer but simpler and easier to remember.
By the way: passkeys. A “passkey” is what big tech companies call their “replacement for passwords” based on their proprietary web technology. It’s often meant to be a single factor, and often they want you to rely on resident keys – resident keys that drag you into their eco-sphere and are very often not compatible with each other. Unless that changes, no passkeys at CERN. Sorry…
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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.
anschaef Thu, 04/10/2025 - 13:18 Byline Computer Security Office Publication Date Thu, 04/10/2025 - 13:17Arts at CERN has announced that French-Swiss artist Marion Tampon-Lajarriette has been selected for the first edition of the Resonance residency. This new programme is part of the arts collaboration between CERN, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva, supported by the CERN & Society Foundation, which was announced last November. Resonance offers an annual residency opportunity for Geneva-based artists dedicated to fostering artistic experimentation through exchanges with CERN’s community and research.
Marion Tampon-Lajarriette’s practice explores phenomena related to vision, memory and the construction of knowledge. She creates immersive installations that blend organic materials, reinterpreted technologies, video and performance. Since 2019, she has developed site-specific research and fostered transdisciplinary dialogues through collaborations with scientists, artists and communities in Switzerland, Mexico and Bolivia.
Tampon-Lajarriette will embark on a two-month residency at CERN to develop Songes cachés de la vallée sombre (Hidden songs of the dark valley), a project that explores the role of intuition and dreaming in scientific discovery. The artist will invite CERN’s community to engage in intuitive writing sessions, experimental visualisations and the creation of a collective dream archive. These exchanges will inform a speculative video-documentary that interweaves scientific language, poetic speculation and imagery of quantum physics. The work will offer a meditation on the entanglement of dreams, fundamental research and its unresolved mysteries, from dark matter to the nature of consciousness.
“It’s very exciting to see CERN strengthen its ties with the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva, through Resonance. CERN and Geneva share a commitment to nurturing curiosity, creativity and innovation, and we are grateful for this fruitful collaboration,” said Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, CERN’s Director for International Relations. “I look forward to seeing how Marion Tampon-Lajarriette will engage with our scientific community and draw inspiration from CERN’s scientific culture and, in turn, renew the way we find poetry and beauty in our fundamental research.”
“The City of Geneva is proud to support the Resonance residency, which embodies its commitment to innovation and to dialogue between art and science by offering Geneva-based artists a unique opportunity to collaborate with the CERN community. This partnership, cemented by a tripartite agreement with the Canton of Geneva and CERN and supported by the CERN & Society Foundation, heralds the start of an ambitious collaboration that the City looks forward to seeing continue in the long term,” said Sophie Sallin, cultural adviser for the City of Geneva.
“The Canton of Geneva works to foster a diverse culture that embraces other disciplines. It is delighted to be associated with the Resonance artistic residency programme, at the crossroads between art and science. This programme also reflects the openness of a major world-renowned scientific organisation towards the city that hosts it and is a way to celebrate the ties between Geneva and CERN through mutual cultural enrichment,” said Thierry Apothéloz, State Councillor for the Republic and Canton of Geneva.
This multi-year collaboration strengthens ties between the Laboratory, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva, fostering dialogue between local artists and the CERN community. Following its inaugural open call, the Resonance residency programme will launch annual calls from 2025 to 2027 to support artistic projects informed by CERN’s physics.
The jury was composed of Yann Chateigné, curator and writer; Xenia Anais Harder, Arts at CERN residencies coordinator; Sophie Sallin, cultural adviser for the City of Geneva; Jérôme Soudan, cultural adviser for the Republic and Canton of Geneva; and Helga Timko, accelerator physicist and member of the CERN Cultural Advisory Board.
angerard Mon, 04/07/2025 - 17:26 Publication Date Tue, 04/08/2025 - 14:00CERN has signed a joint Statement of Intent with Canada concerning future planning for large research infrastructure facilities, and novel and advanced techniques and tools. The Statement was signed by CERN’s Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, and Canada’s Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Philip Jennings.
The Statement details how CERN and Canada intend to strengthen their collaboration in the planning of future projects, including the ongoing Future Circular Collider (FCC) studies, and to expand cooperation on innovative technologies, with a particular focus on the three technology pillars of the field – accelerators, detectors and computing.
With a special note about how fundamental research at major facilities and open science drive technological development and innovation in many domains of society, the Statement acknowledges Canada’s strong contributions to the forthcoming High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). It also establishes that, should the CERN Member States determine that the FCC is likely to be CERN’s next world-leading research facility following the HL-LHC, Canada intends to collaborate on its construction and physics exploitation, subject to appropriate domestic approvals.
The Statement builds on the decades-long participation of Canadian institutions and scientists in the scientific programme at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and at other CERN experiments and facilities, acknowledging the extensive collaboration of Canada and CERN in high-energy particle physics, technology development, innovation, training and education.
ndinmore Mon, 04/07/2025 - 16:31 Publication Date Wed, 04/09/2025 - 16:00The CMS collaboration at CERN has observed an unexpected feature in data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could point to the existence of the smallest composite particle yet observed. The result, reported at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in the Italian Alps this week, suggests that top quarks – the heaviest and shortest lived of all the elementary particles – can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce an object called toponium. Other explanations cannot be ruled out, however, as the existence of toponium was thought too difficult to verify at the LHC, and the result will need to be further scrutinised by CMS’s sister experiment, ATLAS.
High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark–antiquark pairs (tt-bar). Measuring the probability, or cross section, of tt-bar production is both an important test of the Standard Model of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the 50-year-old theory. Many of the open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, motivate the search for new particles that may be too heavy to have been produced in experiments so far.
CMS researchers were analysing a large sample of tt-bar production data collected in 2016–2018 to search for new types of Higgs bosons when they spotted something unusual. Additional Higgs-like particles are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model. If they exist, such particles are expected to interact most strongly with the singularly massive top quark, which weighs in at 184 times the mass of the proton. And if they are massive enough to decay into a top quark–antiquark pair, this should dominate the way they decay inside detectors, with the two massive quarks splintering into “jets” of particles.
Observing more top–antitop pairs than expected is therefore often considered to be a smoking gun for the presence of additional Higgs-like bosons. The CMS data showed just such a surplus. Intriguingly, however, the collaboration observed the excess top-quark pairs at the minimum energy required to produce a pair of top quarks. This led the team to consider an alternative hypothesis long considered difficult to detect: a short-lived union of a top quark and a top antiquark, or toponium.
While tt-bar pairs do not form stable bound states, calculations in quantum chromodynamics – which describes how the strong nuclear force binds quarks into hadrons – predict bound-state enhancements at the tt-bar production threshold. Though other explanations – including an elementary boson such as appears in models with additional Higgs bosons – cannot be ruled out, the cross section that CMS obtains for a simplified toponium-production hypothesis is 8.8 picobarns with an uncertainty of about 15%. This passes the “five sigma” level of certainty required to claim an observation in particle physics, and makes it extremely unlikely that the excess is just a statistical fluctuation.
If the result is confirmed, toponium would be the final example of quarkonium – a term for unstable quark–antiquark states formed from pairings of the heavier charm, bottom and perhaps top quarks. Charmonium (charm–anticharm) was discovered simultaneously at Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory in California and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in the November Revolution in particle physics of 1974. Bottomonium (bottom–antibottom) was discovered at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois in 1977. Charmonium and bottomonium are approximately 0.6 and 0.4 femtometres in size respectively, where one femtometre is a millionth of a nanometre. Bottomonium is thought to be the smallest hadron yet discovered. Given its larger mass, toponium is expected to be far smaller – qualifying it as the smallest known hadron.
For a long time, it was thought that toponium bound states were unlikely to be detected in hadron–hadron collisions. The top quark decays into a bottom quark and a W boson in the time it takes light to travel just 0.1 femtometre – a fraction of the size of the particle itself. Toponium would therefore be unique among quarkonia in that its decay would be triggered by the spontaneous disintegration of one of its constituent quarks rather than by the mutual annihilation of its matter and antimatter components.
CMS and ATLAS are now working closely to study the effect, which remains an open scientific question.
For further details, consult the full report in CERN Courier magazine or visit the CMS website.
ndinmore Thu, 04/03/2025 - 14:38 Publication Date Thu, 04/03/2025 - 14:31Did you know that the camera sensor in your smartphone could help unlock the secrets of antimatter? The AEgIS collaboration, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt’s team from the research neutron source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a detector using modified mobile camera sensors to image in real time the points where antimatter annihilates with matter. This new device, described in a paper just published in Science Advances, can pinpoint antiproton annihilations with a resolution of about 0.6 micrometres, a 35-fold improvement over previous real-time methods.
AEgIS and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such as ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen within Earth’s gravitational field with high precision, each using a different technique. AEgIS’s approach involves producing a horizontal beam of antihydrogen and measuring its vertical displacement using a device called a moiré deflectometer that reveals tiny deviations in motion and a detector that records the antihydrogen annihilation points.
“For AEgIS to work, we need a detector with incredibly high spatial resolution, and mobile camera sensors have pixels smaller than 1 micrometre,” says Francesco Guatieri, the principal investigator on the paper. “We’ve integrated 60 camera sensors into our detector, enabling it to achieve a resolution of 3840 mega pixels – the highest pixel count of any imaging detector to date.”
Previously, photographic plates were the only option, but they lacked real-time capabilities,” added Guatieri. “Our solution, demonstrated for antiprotons and directly applicable to antihydrogen, combines photographic-plate-level resolution, real-time diagnostics, self-calibration and a good particle collection surface, all in one device.”
The researchers used commercial optical image sensors that had previously been shown to be capable of imaging low-energy positrons in real time with unprecedented resolution. “We had to strip away the first layers of the sensors, which are made to deal with the advanced integrated electronics of mobile phones,” says Guatieri. “This required high-level electronic design and micro-engineering.”
A key factor in achieving the record resolution was an unexpected element: crowdsourcing. “We found that human intuition currently outperforms automated methods,” says Guatieri. The AEgIS team asked their colleagues to manually determine the position of the antiproton annihilation points in each of the more than 2500 detector images, a procedure that turned out to be far more accurate and precise than any algorithm. The only downside: it took up to 10 hours for each colleague to plough through every annihilation event.
“The extraordinary resolution also enables us to distinguish between different annihilation fragments,” says AEgIS spokesperson Ruggero Caravita. By measuring the width of tracks of different annihilation products, the researchers can investigate whether the tracks are produced by protons or pions.
“The new detector paves the way for new research on low-energy antiparticle annihilation, and is a game-changing technology for the observation of the tiny shifts in antihydrogen caused by gravity,” says Caravita.
Read more:
Paper: Real-time antiproton annihilation vertexing with sub-micron resolution
anschaef Wed, 04/02/2025 - 13:23 Byline Alex Epshtein Publication Date Wed, 04/02/2025 - 16:22After several years of intense work, CERN and international partners have completed a study to assess the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider (FCC). Reflecting the expertise of over a thousand physicists and engineers across the globe, the report presents an overview of the different aspects related to the potential implementation of such a project.
The FCC is a proposed particle collider with a circumference of about 91 km that could succeed CERN’s current flagship instrument – the 27-km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – in the 2040s. Its scientific motivation stems from the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, along with other crucial outstanding questions in fundamental physics.
The Higgs boson is the simplest yet most perplexing particle discovered so far, with properties that have far-reaching implications for our existence. It is related to the mechanism that enabled elementary particles such as electrons to gain mass a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang, allowing atoms and thus structures to form. It may also be connected to the fate of the Universe and could potentially shed light on the many unsolved mysteries of modern physics.
As described in Feasibility Study Report, the FCC research programme outlines two possible stages: an electron–positron collider serving as a Higgs, electroweak and top-quark factory running at different centre-of-mass energies, followed at a later stage by a proton–proton collider operating at an unprecedented collision energy of around 100 TeV. The complementary physics programmes of each stage match the highest priorities set out in the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics.
The report covers wide-ranging aspects related to the potential implementation of such a project. These include physics objectives, geology, civil engineering, technical infrastructure, territorial and environmental dimensions, R&D needs for the accelerators and detectors, socioeconomic benefits, and cost.
The estimated cost of construction of the FCC electron–positron stage, including the tunnel and all the infrastructure, is 15 billion Swiss francs. This investment, which would be distributed over a period of about 12 years starting from the early 2030s, includes the civil engineering, technical infrastructure, electron and positron accelerators and four detectors for operation. As was the case for the construction of the LHC, the majority of the funding would come from CERN’s current annual budget.
CERN has made a commitment that any new project at the Laboratory would be an exemplar of a sustainable research infrastructure, integrating ecodesign principles into every phase of the project, from design to construction, operations and dismantling. The report details the concepts and paths to keep the FCC’s environmental footprint low while boosting new technologies to benefit society and developing territorial synergies such as energy reuse.
A major component of the FCC Feasibility Study has been the layout and placement of the collider ring and related infrastructure, which have been diligently studied to maximise the scientific benefit while taking into account territorial compatibility, environmental and construction constraints and cost. No fewer than 100 scenarios were developed and analysed before settling on the preferred option: a ring circumference of 90.7 km at an average depth of 200 m, with eight surface sites and four experiments.
Throughout the Feasibility Study process, CERN has been accompanied by its two Host States, France and Switzerland, working with entities at the local, regional and national levels. Engagement processes with the public are being prepared in line with the Host States’ respective frameworks to ensure a constructive dialogue with territorial stakeholders.
The report, which does not imply any commitments by the CERN Member and Associate Member States to build the FCC, will be reviewed by various independent expert bodies before being examined by the CERN Council at a dedicated meeting in November 2025. The Council may take a decision on whether or not to proceed with the FCC project around 2028.
Particle colliders play a unique role in physics exploration. They also enable the development of unprecedented technologies in many fields of relevance for society, ranging from superconducting materials for medical applications, fusion energy research and electricity transmission to advanced accelerators and detectors for medical and many other applications.
The FCC Feasibility Study was launched following the recommendations of the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics and will serve as input for the ongoing update of the Strategy, along with studies of alternative projects proposed by the scientific community.
Further information:
In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analysing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly – a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons. This suggested that the so-called “isospin symmetry” between up and down quarks might be broken by more than expected due to the differences in their electric charges and masses – a discrepancy that existing theoretical models would struggle to explain. Known sources of isospin asymmetry only predict deviations of a few percent.
“When Wojciech got started, we thought it would be a trivial verification of the symmetry,” says Marek Gaździcki, who was spokesperson of NA61/SHINE at the time of the discovery. “We expected the symmetry to be closely obeyed – although we had previously measured these types of discrepancies at the NA49 experiment, they had large uncertainties and were not significant.”
Isospin symmetry is one facet of flavour symmetry, whereby the strong interaction treats all quark flavours identically. This means that all types of quarks should behave the same under the strong interaction, except for kinematic differences arising from their different masses. Isospin is not a symmetry of the electromagnetic interaction as up and down quarks have different electric charges. According to isospin symmetry, strong interactions in heavy-ion collisions should generate nearly equal amounts of charged kaons (comprising either an up quark and a strange antiquark or an up antiquark and a strange quark) and neutral kaons (comprising either a down quark and a strange antiquark or a down antiquark and a strange quark), given the similar masses of the up and down quarks. NA61/SHINE’s data contradicts the hypothesis of equal yields with a 4.7σ significance.
“I see two ways to interpret the results,” says Francesco Giacosa, a theoretical physicist working with NA61/SHINE. “First, we might be substantially underestimating the role of electromagnetic interactions in creating quark–antiquark pairs. Second, these results could mean that strong interactions do not obey flavour symmetry. If this is true, it would contradict physicists’ current understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), that is, how quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong interaction) combine.”
While the experiment routinely measures particle yields in nuclear collisions, finding a discrepancy in isospin symmetry was not something the researchers were actively looking for. NA61/SHINE’s primary focus is studying properties of the production of hadrons in the production of hadrons when beams from CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron collide with a variety of fixed nuclear targets. This data is also shared with neutrino and cosmic ray experiments, such as T2K, to help them to refine their models.
The collaboration is now planning additional studies on this new result, using different projectiles, targets and collision energies to determine whether this effect is unique to certain heavy-ion collisions or is a more general feature of high-energy interactions. It has also put out a call to theoretical physicists to help explain what might have caused such an unexpectedly large asymmetry.
“We tried to fit the data into the current, existing models, but it didn’t work at all — it was just not possible,” says Giacosa. “We need more experimental data and more theoretical predictions to fill our gap in knowledge of the strong interaction. So the real question is: what’s next?”
Read more:
ndinmore Thu, 03/27/2025 - 17:26 Byline Alex Epshtein Publication Date Fri, 03/28/2025 - 09:23
Quantum entanglement is a fascinating phenomenon where two particles’ states are tied to each other, no matter how far apart the particles are. In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for groundbreaking experiments involving entangled photons. These experiments confirmed the predictions for the manifestation of entanglement that had been made by the late CERN theorist John Bell. This phenomenon has so far been observed in a wide variety of systems, such as in top quarks at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2024. Entanglement has also found several important societal applications, such as quantum cryptography and quantum computing. Now, it also explains the famous herd mentality of sheep.
A flock of sheep (ovis aries) has roamed the CERN site during the spring and summer months for over 40 years. Along with the CERN shepherd, they help to maintain the vast expanses of grassland around the LHC and are part of the Organization’s long-standing efforts to protect the site’s biodiversity. In addition, their flocking behaviour has been of great interest to CERN's physicists. It is well known that sheep behave like particles: their stochastic behaviour has been studied by zoologists and physicists alike, who noticed that a flock’s ability to quickly change phase is similar to that of atoms in a solid and a liquid. Known as the Lamb Shift, this can cause them to get themselves into bizarre situations, such as walking in a circle for days on end.
Now, new research has shed light on the reason for these extraordinary abilities. Scientists at CERN have found evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep. Using sophisticated modelling techniques and specialised trackers, the findings show that the brains of individual sheep in a flock are quantum-entangled in such a way that the sheep can move and vocalise simultaneously, no matter how far apart they are. The evidence has several ramifications for ovine research and has set the baa for a new branch of quantum physics.
“The fact that we were having our lunch next to the flock was a shear coincidence,” says Mary Little, leader of the HERD collaboration, describing how the project came about. “When we saw and herd their behaviour, we wanted to investigate the movement of the flock using the technology at our disposal at the Laboratory.”
Observing the sheep’s ability to simultaneously move and vocalise together caused one main question to aries: since the sheep behave like subatomic particles, could quantum effects be the reason for their behaviour?
“Obviously, we couldn’t put them all in a box and see if they were dead or alive,” said Beau Peep, a researcher on the project. “However, by assuming that the sheep were spherical, we were able to model their behaviour in almost the exact same way as we model subatomic particles.”
Using sophisticated trackers, akin to those in the LHC experiments, the physicists were able to locate the precise particles in the sheep’s brains that might be the cause of this entanglement. Dubbed “moutons” and represented by the Greek letter lambda, l, these particles are leptons and are close relatives of the muon, but fluffier.
The statistical significance of the findings is 4 sigma, which is enough to show evidence of the phenomenon. However, it does not quite pass the baa to be classed as an observation.
“More research is needed to fully confirm that this was indeed an observation of ovine entanglement or a statistical fluctuation,” says Ewen Woolly, spokesperson for the HERD collaboration. “This may be difficult, as we have found that the research makes physicists become inexplicably drowsy.”
“While entanglement is now the leading theory for this phenomenon, we have to take everything into account,” adds Dolly Shepherd, a CERN theorist. “Who knows, maybe further variables are hidden beneath their fleeces. Wolves, for example.”
Theoretical physicist John Ellis, pioneer of the penguin diagram, with its updated sheep version. Scientists at CERN find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep in 2025, the year declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. (Image: CERN) ndinmore Thu, 03/27/2025 - 16:27 Byline Naomi Dinmore Publication Date Tue, 04/01/2025 - 08:19Last week, on 19 March, the first beam-based physics of the year began when protons from the PS hit the n_TOF target, producing the neutrons required for the n_TOF experiments. On that same day, physics was also scheduled to start in the PS East Area, but had to be delayed after an issue with a collimator in one of the four East Area beamlines was identified: the collimator was found to be partially closed and obstructing the beam path.
Collimators are key components used to remove unwanted halo particles from the beam. They consist of movable parts that can be adjusted electro-mechanically to set the beam’s aperture. In this case, the faulty collimator required replacement.
Under the coordination of the Experimental Areas (BE-EA) group, a team of experts from various domains quickly devised a plan for the replacement. However, accessing the collimator required the removal of the thick concrete shielding blocks above the beamline.
Initial estimates projected a delay of three to four days to the start of physics in the East Area, with hopes of resuming beam operations over the weekend. Thanks to the efficiency and excellent collaboration of the teams involved, the collimator was successfully replaced and the shielding reinstated in the early afternoon of 22 March. Beam for physics was delivered to the East Area at 4 p.m. that same day, just in time for the weekend and only two days behind the original schedule.
On the left: the collimator that has been replaced. On the right: work in progress to remove the roof shielding to access the collimator. (Image: CERN)Meanwhile, beam commissioning in the SPS is progressing well. A high-intensity LHC-type beam, containing more protons per bunch than usual, is currently being used to “scrub” the vacuum chamber. This scrubbing process helps reduce the emission of secondary electrons, which in turn lowers the formation of electron clouds. Minimising electron-cloud effects is essential for stable beam conditions and quality when the LHC-type beam is eventually delivered to the LHC.
In parallel, SPS experts have been setting up the beam and its slow extraction for the SPS North Area. Slow extraction is a technique in which the accelerated beam is gradually extracted from the SPS over millions of turns. During each turn, only a small fraction of the beam is extracted, allowing the entire extraction process to span approximately 4.5 seconds.
In the coming weeks, beamline physicists will use this extracted beam to set up the various beamlines in the North Area, delivering the beam to the experiments. Physics in the North Area is scheduled to begin on 14 April.
In my previous report, I mentioned the presence of a small vacuum leak in the SPS. The opening and closing of this leak appear to be synchronised with the pulsing of the magnets, but the leak remains too small to be precisely located, making it impossible to determine with certainty which magnet needs to be replaced.
Depending on how one looks at it, the leak has fortunately or unfortunately not evolved; it remains present but stable. As time goes on, however, it is increasingly likely that a one-day stop during the physics run may be required to replace a magnet. That said, this decision will depend on whether the leak worsens and becomes easier to localise. We continue to monitor the situation closely and will keep you informed as it develops.
On the LHC side, testing of all power converters, electrical circuits, magnets and other systems is progressing well and is even slightly ahead of schedule. On the machine side all remains on track for the first beam injection, originally planned for 4 April.
However, we recently received some unfortunate news from the ATLAS experiment. A water leak was discovered in the cooling system of their argon calorimeter (detector), which now requires repair. To access the affected components, the detector must be opened on one side, which is usually a complex and time-consuming operation.
Despite the complexity of the operation, the resulting delay to the overall LHC schedule is expected to be limited to just two weeks. This situation highlights a key difference between the LHC and the rest of the accelerator complex: in the LHC, the experiments are fully integrated into the machine itself, meaning that an intervention in ATLAS directly affects the ability to inject and circulate beam. In contrast, experiments in the injector complex operate on separate beamlines and are therefore independent of accelerator operation.
The LHC machine teams are working closely with the ATLAS collaboration to develop a plan that makes most efficient use of the available time and keeps the delay to a minimum.
Originally, first beam was scheduled for 4 April, comfortably ahead of the Easter weekend. Many were pleased, as LHC beam commissioning has traditionally, though unintentionally, coincided with Easter. Now, if the two-week delay holds, the 2025 commissioning may once again fall during the Easter weekend. Have we discovered a new constant of nature? We’ll see in the coming days when the details become clearer…
anschaef Thu, 03/27/2025 - 11:41 Byline Rende Steerenberg Publication Date Thu, 03/27/2025 - 11:39Join CERN on Friday, 4 April to celebrate the achievements and long career of Ugo Amaldi as he turns 90.
Ugo Amaldi joined CERN as a fellow in September 1961. He then spent 10 years at the Italian health institute Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, performing experiments in nuclear and particle physics alongside radiation physics and radiotherapy. Returning to CERN, he helped to discover the rise in energy in the proton–proton cross-section at the Intersecting Storage Rings, and later led the DELPHI collaboration at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP). In the early 1990s, he founded the TERA Foundation, introducing hadron therapy to Italy. Today, he continues to promote the use of accelerators in cancer treatment and is president emeritus of the National Centre for Oncological Hadrontherapy (CNAO) in Pavia.
Hear all about his outstanding contributions to physics and society on Friday, 4 April, from 2 p.m. in the Main Auditorium. Distinguished scientists will present and discuss his major achievements, including his contributions to particle physics while at CERN, the creation of the TERA Foundation, the design of novel particle accelerators for hadron therapy and his role in setting up an international network for cancer treatment with proton and ion beams. The celebrations will then continue with a drinks reception.
Register now to attend in person. The event is open to all, but registration is required for organisational purposes and to issue CERN access cards for non-CERN attendees. A webcast will also be available for the event.
Read more in an interview with Ugo Amaldi in the latest CERN Courier that draws on his childhood memories and his distinguished career at CERN to offer deeply personal insights into his father Edoardo’s foundational contributions to international cooperation in science. See also his contribution to the CERN70 feature series: From physics to medicine.
ndinmore Wed, 03/26/2025 - 14:17 Publication Date Thu, 03/27/2025 - 14:15Recently, the Computer Security Office reported on a cybersecurity incident at a remote Tier 2 site of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). Compromised to the backbone, dozens of servers deeply infiltrated by the attackers, taken over and abused for cryptocurrency mining. For months. While the attackers’ earnings in dollars might reach five digits, the costs to that Tier 2 site are also significant. Let’s look at the ledger:
Given that we cannot disclose the local currency and the average salaries, of course, we cannot share a quantitative figure. But in abstract numbers over the whole time span of 6–8 months (detection, response and reinstallation) this adds up to 30–40 PM and 10% of their investment in compute. Or 10% of their committed computing power. Either number is non-negligible.
Compare that with the costs of implementing proper security measures prior to any incident. Actually, “prior” doesn’t even matter anymore as the same security measures will definitely need to be implemented in the aftermath. Any auditor, any incident responder and, in this particular case, even the attackers(!) pushed for such proper measures. And with 40 PM and 10% of the operating expenses of a computer centre, you can already put some decent security mechanisms in place. Firewalls. Monitoring. Better configurations. So, what about you? Ready to act prior to or after an incident?
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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.
anschaef Wed, 03/26/2025 - 12:37 Byline Computer Security Office Publication Date Thu, 03/27/2025 - 12:35Spring is in the air! As the accelerator complex starts to awaken, so too does the biodiversity on the CERN site. But it’s not just blossom on the trees and sheep returning to graze – the vast CERN sites are home to a plethora of species.
To celebrate spring, we’re launching an online nature-themed scavenger hunt, using the “biodiversity walk” website. Created by SCE’s Geographic Information System team, the biodiversity walk takes you on a comprehensive virtual tour of CERN’s biodiversity around Meyrin, Prévessin and beyond.
Participants in the scavenger hunt will have a chance to win two CAGI Choco Passes courtesy of Geneva Tourism and the International Geneva Welcome Centre (CAGI), which runs a cultural kiosk at CERN. The Choco Passes are for two people to spend a day exploring Geneva and sampling chocolates from a range of different chocolate shops.
Here’s how to enter the scavenger hunt:
All entries will go into a prize draw and the winner of the two Choco Passes will be announced in the next edition of the Bulletin. Good luck!
Questions:
Following an international open call launched in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary in November, Arts at CERN has announced that Polish artist Martyna Marciniak has won the third edition of the Collide Copenhagen residency.
Collide is a residency programme organised by Arts at CERN in partnership with a leading cultural institution in a CERN Member State. Established in 2012, the residency offers artists a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Laboratory’s environment and engage in meaningful dialogue with its scientific community. The thirteenth edition of Collide, and the third of Collide Copenhagen, attracted 774 proposals from 109 different countries.
Martyna Marciniak is a Polish artist and researcher based in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice combines spatial storytelling, speculative fiction and 3D reconstruction to examine how design and technology shape ideologies and social structures. Her recent work has focused on developing a methodology that integrates the aesthetics of disinformation into a semi-fictional storytelling format that ignites imagination and critical reflection.
Marciniak will complete a two-month residency, split between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, to develop her proposal, entitled “2.2 microseconds: an anomaly”. The project investigates the “split-second problem”, examining how micro-temporal events, such as a muon’s 2.2-microsecond lifespan, reveal the interconnectedness of human systems and cosmic phenomena. One such anomaly is the bit-flip, where cosmic rays alter a bit in a computer’s memory. These glitches expose the inner workings of technological, financial and computational infrastructures, paradoxically rendering them more perceptible.
The artist will create a sculptural timepiece and a video essay that explore the intersections between cosmic, technological and bodily timescales. Drawing from muon tomography and scientific timekeeping, the sculpture will reflect the infrastructures designed to measure fleeting phenomena. The video essay will propose new narratives and sensory modes for experiencing time’s complexity, inviting a sense of wonder about the errors that shape our world.
“At Copenhagen Contemporary, we are beyond excited to round up a successful three-year partnership with Arts at CERN by presenting Martyna Marciniak as the third recipient of Collide Copenhagen. Marciniak's project for Collide seeks to modulate our understanding of time, offering new narratives and sensory modes for experiencing its complexity,” says Marie Laurberg, director of Copenhagen Contemporary.
Together with the 2023 and 2024 awardees, Joan Heemskerk and Alice Bucknell, Marciniak will take part in the exhibition “Soft Robots”, which will open in June at Copenhagen Contemporary.
The jury consisted of Giulia Bini, head of programme and curator of “Enter the Hyper-Scientific” at EPFL Lausanne; Vitor Cardoso, director of the Centre of Gravity at the Niels Bohr Institute; Marie Laurberg, director of Copenhagen Contemporary; Majken Overgaard, an independent curator, and Ana Prendes, assistant curator of Arts at CERN.
Collide Copenhagen has been the collaboration framework between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary since 2023, as part of a three-year collaboration. A new partner for the Arts at CERN residency programme will be announced in 2025.
angerard Mon, 03/17/2025 - 14:45 Publication Date Tue, 03/18/2025 - 14:00At CERN, beams of particles are accelerated faster and faster, just like a relay race (where each runner is faster than the previous one). The LHC’s relay team has five runners, in order of appearance: Linear Accelerator 4 (Linac4), the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB), the Proton Synchrotron (PS), the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
At the end of each year, the whole complex comes to a halt for the traditional “year-end technical stop”. And every February, as the first green shoots of spring start to appear, the hustle and bustle begins again as CERN recommissions its accelerators.
This year, the wheels were set back in motion on 19 February, when the first particle beam of 2025 circulated in Linac4. The second link in the chain, the PS Booster, received its first particles on 26 February, the PS on 4 March and, today, the SPS accelerated its first proton beams of the year.
Of course, the recommissioning of the CERN accelerator complex is no walk in the park. The machines are restarted according to a meticulously planned process, combining sequential and parallel workflows. Nonetheless, things are progressing in leaps and bounds and, from next week, CERN's various experimental areas will gradually start receiving their first particles, until the LHC titan awakens on 4 April.
If you want to find out more about the 2025 physics programme at the LHC, in the injectors and in the various experimental areas, check out this article. Put the date of 4 April in your diaries, as well as the beginning of July for a special physics run: the acceleration and collision of oxygen ions (a first at the LHC!). Watch this space.
anschaef Fri, 03/14/2025 - 09:49 Byline Anaïs Schaeffer Publication Date Fri, 03/14/2025 - 09:33
On 7 March, CERN welcomed Her Excellency Ms Giorgia Meloni, President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic. The Prime Minister and her delegation visited Point 1 of the LHC alongside CERN’s Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti; the Director for Finance and Human Resources, Raphaël Bello; the Director for Research and Computing, Joachim Mnich; the Director for International Relations, Charlotte Warakaulle; senior Italian physicist and President of the TERA Foundation, Ugo Amaldi; the Head of the Theoretical Physics department, Gian Giudice; the Head of the Information Technology department, Enrica Porcari; the Italian spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Vincenzo Vagnoni; the Italian former department Head in charge of the Management liaison for Italy, Roberto Losito and the President of INFN, Antonio Zoccoli.
Following an introduction to CERN’s activities by the Director-General, the delegation then visited, accompanied by Ludovico Pontecorvo from the ATLAS collaboration, the ATLAS control room and experiment cavern, as well as the LHC tunnel. They also had the opportunity to discover CERN Science Gateway’s exhibitions.
anschaef Thu, 03/13/2025 - 11:16 Publication Date Thu, 03/13/2025 - 11:14On 13 March 2025, Swissmint issued a special "CERN" coin symbolising Swiss and global innovation.
Swissmint is the company mandated by the Swiss Confederation to mint Switzerland's standard coins, the ones you use for everyday payments. It also produces special-edition coins to mark important historical and cultural events or to honour eminent Swiss personalities or organisations.
The special, limited-edition CERN coin is made of silver and weighs 20 grams. A particle collision is depicted on the “heads” side (known as “obverse” in numismatic jargon), while the “tails” (or “reverse”) side depicts the cross-section of an LHC magnet.
The coin is worth 20 Swiss francs and is on sale on Swissmint’s website.
A luxury “burnished flan” version will be presented at the International Coin Fair in Bern in mid-May and will then go on sale in a display box at the CERN shop.
More information can be found on the Swissmint and the Swiss Government websites.
ndinmore Thu, 03/13/2025 - 11:23 Publication Date Thu, 03/13/2025 - 15:42
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