A word from the EP Deputy Department Head - June 2021
Dear colleagues in EP,
Welcome to the summer edition of the EP newsletter, which is packed with material related to the work in our department, that we hope you will find interesting. Despite the ongoing pandemic there has been remarkable progress on the experimental programme of CERN, preparing for the imminent restart of physics in the injector chain, and for the first beams expected back in the LHC following the shutdown, later this year. You can find diverse articles on the installation of the beampipe of CMS, the ITS of ALICE, the new experiment FASER, a new experimental technique at ISOLDE, and on work at ATLAS both on alignment of their muon stations and in their magnet group, which contributes strongly to the newly formed EP Magnet Working Group.
Other articles touch on the physics of axions, the progress towards a Detector R&D Roadmap (driven by ECFA in the context of the recommendation from the European Strategy for Particle Physics), and a report on a recent workshop concerning environmentally-friendlier gases for detectors. Finally, you will no doubt be aware of the gathering excitement over the various anomalies that have shown up recently in the behaviour of the charged leptons (e, µ, τ) -- that may herald the (long-awaited) first cracks in the Standard Model -- in particular the b-hadron anomalies from LHCb, and the recent update of g-2 for the muon. The special feature provides all the information needed to judge these hints for yourself, and how they might be explained, as well as introducing the wide programme at CERN of future measurements to confirm them, including the NA64 and MUonE experiments at the SPS.
As optimism increases that the pandemic will soon less dominate our lives, we can look forward to more flexible access to the CERN sites and more personal interaction with our colleagues, that we have missed over the last year. I hope you will be able to take a safe and relaxing break over the summer period, even if the travel restrictions are not yet fully behind us.
