Dear Colleagues

I am glad to present you the first issue of a completely new format of the PH Newsletter. Thanks to the help of Panos Charitos (Panagiotis.Charitos@cern.ch) , who is a member of the editorial board of the ALICE  matters ( http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/  ) and has accepted to devote a fraction of his time on the PH newsletters, we have moved to a Web-based format,  allowing much more flexibility and a modern presentation[1]. Even more important, the scientific content is considerably enriched and the coverage of the department activities is much wider. 

There are already many communication channels at CERN (for example the Bulletin or the LHC experiments newsletters), and our goal is to provide complementary information, focusing mainly on the work done in our department. Beyond news, interviews and the list of new arrivals in PH , you will find articles of high scientific content which are therefore targeted towards personnel working on CERN related projects and not towards the “grand public”. For example, we will try to systematically include a mini “scientific review” in the newsletter;  for  the present issue, it is a review of the results obtained with the ISOLTRAP experiment. We hope that you will enjoy reading these papers as a way to enlarge your scientific culture and learn about the very diverse physics program performed at CERN.

You will also find short articles written by the speakers of the Colloquia who took place recently at CERN.  As you know, Colloquia are often an opportunity to learn about domains beyond our own field.  Reading this report may be an incentive to look at the Webcast of the Colloquium, if you have not been able to attend.

We hope that you will enjoy this revised format of the PH Newsletters. The advertisement is sent only to the PH department members, but we encourage you to show it to your collaborators from other departments or from external institutes. 

We are of course eager to have your feedback on this initiative. Please do not hesitate to send a mail to Panos or  myself.  We intend to publish an issue every 2 or 3 months, this is clearly a non-negligible effort and it makes sense only if you find it interesting and enriching.

Since our last issue end January, the first period of exploitation of LHC has ended with a very successful run of Lead-proton (and proton-Lead !) collisions with a participation of all LHC experiments, including LHCb. Both machine and experiments have now entered into the Long Shutdown work.

Furthermore, at the Moriond conference early this month, the latest results have been presented, in particular concerning the Higgs-like particle discovered last July by ATLAS and CMS .  Among those one could mention strong hints of a signal in the ττ decay channel by CMS, statistical compatibility of the signal strength in the various channels with the expected Standard Model Higgs production and strong preference for a spin parity O⁺ .  On the basis of these results, it has been decided to call the discovered particle “a Higgs Boson”.  However, a lot of work and further data taking will be needed to assert with certainty that it is “the” Standard Model Higgs Boson.

Philippe