Dear Colleagues, dear Members of the EP Department and CERN Users,

It is a pleasure to introduce the summer issue of the EP newsletter. Ten years after the Higgs discovery in July 2012, CERN is preparing to enter full physics mode!

As you read this EP Newsletter the LHC experiments are preparing to operate in full physics mode following the start-up of the LHC last spring. Teams from around the world with the support of EP groups are working to finalize the installation and commissioning of the upgraded detectors in light of the more intense collisions of Run 3. A wealth of results has been presented by the LHC and non-LHC experiments in the summer conferences continuing to test the boundaries of the Standard Model. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery, CERN will host a dedicated symposium to reflect on the steps that led to the Higgs boson discovery and discuss the future challenges.

The diversity of ongoing activities are covered in the present issue of our newsletter. You will find articles on the restart of the ATLAS and CMS magnets as well as the completion of the installation of the SciFi detector by the LHCb collaboration and the new ITS-2 at the heart of the ALICE experiment. Moreover, a new detector in the FASER experiment and the completion of the SND @LHC experiment will further extend the physics reach of the LHC and search for hypothetical long-lived particles. In the same issue you can also read a report from the recent workshop (LLP’11) of an ever-growing community. In order to harvest the physics opportunities offered by the new run of the LHC, developments are needed both at the hardware and the software level. You can read a report on the FELIX readout system, originally developed for ATLAS, and its applications in other experiments and get the latest news about Geant4 and its planned upgrades. In the same forward-looking way, we publish an article about the activities of the MODE (for Machine-learning Optimized Design of Experiments) collaboration that targets the use of differentiable programming in design optimization of detectors for particle physics to space, nuclear and industrial applications.

We also report on the recent approval of the Einstein Telescope project as a recognized CERN experiment. CERN will take an important role in overseeing the technical design (TDR) of the baseline solution for the vacuum system of Einstein Telescope and the associated R&D efforts. The article reminds us of the many ways in which CERN can contribute to other projects in fundamental science providing expertise and special testing infrastructures. In addition, an article by two theoreticians describes how measurements at future colliders like the FCC can provide crucial data for the understanding of the Higgs field and the so-called electroweak phase transition.

I hope that you will enjoy reading these articles and wish you a nice and relaxing summer.

Christian Joram