While the temperature is rising and the summer has started, we are in the middle of this year’s LHC run and the non-LHC experiments are also taking good data. The machines and the LHC experiments show excellent performance, with problems appearing here and there but quickly being solved. We may optimistically look forward to another very successful year for CERN.

I would like to thank all of you, CERN staff, fellows, students and Users who are contributing to this successful operation. I believe the appreciation of the success of CERN was also key to the decision of the Member and Associate Member States within Council to approve, by a large majority, an additional, exceptional contribution to help CERN manage the financial challenges triggered by high inflation and energy-price escalation.

This EP newsletter exhibits again a tour through the many and diverse activities of our department, with contributions from several experiments and EP support and R&D groups. These include new first physics results from FASER, progress on the R&D for an ultralight structure for a future ALICE vertex detector, and an article on future CP violation tests by ISOLDE experiments.

The work for the experiment upgrades during LS3 is also making good progress, with many components already in production. See for example the article from ESE on the successful production of 200,000 Low Power Giga Bit Transceivers (lpGBT) to be used by the LHC experiments as well as in the accelerators. Physics also doesn’t come up short in the newsletter. Read the interesting interview of Michael Peskin and the physics outlooks for LHCb and ATLAS.

Let me also remind you that by scrolling down the newsletter page, you will find a section where the new arrivals who have recently joined our department introduce themselves.

Finally, I would also like to wish you a nice summer period, and in case you leave for one of your well-deserved holidays, enjoy the time with your loved ones!