Dear Colleagues,

The award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to F.Englert and P.Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider" has been fantastic news.

The (unusual) fact that CERN, LHC and the experiments are explicitly mentioned in the citation of the Academy is a great honour and a recognition of the work performed by all of us.

As shown at the HL-LHC workshop, which took place in Aix-Les Bains earlier this month, the discovery of the Higgs particle has opened up prospects for a rich program of physics for the next 20 years at the LHC. In Aix, the four main LHC experiments presented their upgrades plans, to be able to integrate 3000 fb^-1 over ~10 years (100 times more than today !) , as recommended by the European Strategy Update process. We will certainly come back to these plans in future editions of the PH newsletter. The slides of the workshop can be viewed at  http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=25204. Of course, we all hope that more surprises are around the corner: the energy increase of LHC at the restart in 2015 should increase the potential for searches by orders of magnitude.

In addition, in the workshop’s opening session, the DG announced the setting-up of a study group for a Future Circular Collider of 80 to 100 km circumference in view of 100 TeV proton-proton collisions, with an option for e⁺e^- collisions up to 350 GeV and even e-p collisions. This, together with the on-going R&D on a multi-TeV e⁺e^- collider (CLIC), constitutes the vigorous answer of CERN towards the second recommendation of the European Strategy group to prepare for an ambitious post-LHC program at the high energy frontier in Europe.  

The future looks really exciting!  

We should not forget however another mission of our organisation, which is to transmit knowledge and technology to society. Medical applications are a field where this transfer can be particularly strong, because accelerators, imaging technologies and computing are playing an ever-increasing role in medicine. We have therefore decided to devote a large fraction of this edition to this effort, with both a general view of CERN’s implication (including an interview with Steve Myers who will start coordinating these activities in 2014) and emphasis on the role of the PH teams.

Best regards,

Philippe