New Staff Members and Fellows

Higgs Boson Physics - The View Ahead

The observation of electroweak symmetry breaking in nature implies the existence of Goldstone bosons that provide the longitudinal components of the massive W and Z gauge bosons. A priori, one could have imagined a plethora of possible dynamical…

A word from the EP Department Head - September 2022

Dear Colleagues in EP, The world has changed following the invasion of the Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the unfolding events have also affected CERN, given the international nature of modern scientific collaborations. The upcoming winter…

Exploring the Higgs: A Personal Retrospective

When I started my career as a theoretical physicist in the early 1980’s, the Higgs boson was not yet a topic of major theoretical interest.  There was a long gap between the time when the Brout- Englert-Higgs mechanism was proposed and when people…

The long hunt for the Higgs boson

An essay about the Higgs boson ten years after its discovery? Already ten years? This unique adventure has left indelible memories to the thousands of people who have been instrumental in giving birth to this wonderful discovery. There have been…

From Despair to Discovery

The Ultimate Higgs Discovery Machine: The excitement amongst particle physicists around the world was palpable when the LHC, a proton accelerator twenty years in the making, started its commissioning phase on 10th September 2008. With 7 TeV protons…

Solving New Puzzles with the Higgs Boson

… to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding   You might think that particle physics has accomplished its goals with the discovery of the last piece of the Standard Model jigsaw puzzle, the…

Scrutinising cosmic antimatter production with an innovative use of LHCb

“The real prize is finding something new out there” is one of the most famous citations by Vera Rubin, the scientist who around 1975 firstly observed the anomalous rotation curves of spiral galaxies, providing evidence for the possible existence of…

ATLAS and CMS experiments looking forward to Run 3

On the 4th of July of 2022 we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of decades-long search for an experimental confirmation of the BEH mechanism, and the start of a new era. With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last unknown fundamental…

In discussion with Rolf-Dieter Heuer

Rolf-Dieter Heuer is no stranger to CERN, serving as Director General of the organization from 2009 to 2015. Previous to that, from 1984 to 1998, he was a staff member at the Laboratory, working for the OPAL collaboration at the Large Electron…