CERN Courier Sep/Oct 2024
Welcome to the digital edition of the September/October 2024 issue of CERN Courier.
The four accelerators spliced together in our cover image span all seven decades of CERN’s history. They also tell much of the experimental story of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model of particle physics. The Proton Synchrotron generated the neutrino beam used to discover neutral currents. The W and Z bosons were discovered with the Super Proton Synchrotron. The Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP) constrained the model. And the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, which – quite remarkably – now rivals LEP in electroweak precision (p29). What comes next?
With the third update to the European strategy for particle physics underway, the debate now starts in earnest, and you are invited to contribute (p7). Early-career researchers have a vital role to play. The heart of this edition is devoted to 13 of their viewpoints on the future of high-energy physics (p46).
Also in this edition: experts from across CERN look back to the future (p53); an interview with the president of the CERN Council (p63); technology transfer from the LHC to medicine and industry (p37); new physics could be hiding in the Higgs self-coupling (p61); lattice QCD suggests there is less new physics in muon g–2 than previously hoped (p21); the German community debates CERN’s future (p22); and BASE cuts the time to cool antiprotons from 15 hours to eight minutes (p8)