Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to share the latest edition of the EP newsletter with you. You will notice that this time several articles have a “historical touch” in line with the one-year-long celebrations of CERN’s 70th anniversary that are coming to a close. 

Michael Campbell will take you through the extraordinary journey of the Medipix and Timepix projects. You will read about the advances in silicon photonics circuits for integrated high-speed optical readout, as well as the progress made over 30 years of R&D on radiation-tolerant silicon detectors. An interesting interview with Ugo Amaldi gives a glimpse into the birth of CERN and the history of the European Physics over the 20th century, while another article retraces the history of the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma.

Looking towards the future, the workshop on “Extended Scalar Sectors from All Angles” that took place in October at CERN is described, where theorists, phenomenologists, and experimentalists came together to discuss this subject from different perspectives.

This edition also presents the results obtained by NA62 with the observation of the ultra-rare decay K⁺ → π⁺νν̄ , the efforts to search for axion-like particles with CAST, and the promising tests done in BASE-STEP to prove the ability to transport antimatter from the production site to other laboratories where it can be studied in detail.

The newsletter is also an occasion for putting the spotlight on facilities that not everybody may be familiar with at CERN: the research goals and instrumentation of ISOLDE and n_TOF are shown this time, including the results from the analysis of n_TOF-EAR1 beam data.

Of course, results from experiments at the LHC cannot be left out. Recent publications from ATLAS broadening the understanding of the Higgs boson couplings are summarized and the setup, achievements and prospects of two smaller experiments at the LHC are presented: SND and TOTEM.

As the year draws to an end, I think that we should take a moment to congratulate each other for our outstanding achievements and celebrate our ability to surmount challenges and stumbling blocks together.

Best wishes for a joyful holiday season and a happy New Year!

Giovanna