Newsletter Articles
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January 2025 - March 2025
The first measurement of the W boson mass (mw) performed by the CMS Collaboration was announced in September 2024. This result has been long-awaited—the first LHC measurement of mW, by the ATLAS Collaboration, was shown nearly 7 years ago. In the…
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January 2025 - March 2025
R&D activities are vital for the ROOT project. A few years ago, we started investigating the evolution of TTree, ROOT’s columnar format with which more than two exabytes of data were written at the LHC: experiments write data, lots of it, to…
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January 2025 - March 2025
One of the conclusions from the ESPPU 2013 process was that CERN should actively engage in the global accelerator-based neutrino program. As a result, CERN became involved in various initiatives, including the DUNE project, and took a leading role…
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January 2025 - March 2025
The field of nuclear physics is well into its second century. From its initial experiment bombarding a gold foil with alpha particles, experimental techniques have become more sophisticated to keep pace with the technology and innovation that has…
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January 2025 - March 2025
Plastic scintillator detectors are cost-effective and benefit from a very fast response as well as the possibility to easily shape their geometry. Thus, their deployment is a standard in most of the particle physics experiments. Although their…
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October-December 2024
One of the most fascinating characteristics of particles carrying colour charge, such as quarks and gluons, is their inability to exist as free entities in nature. They are indeed perpetually confined within colour-neutral composite particles known…
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October-December 2024
The unification of the electromagnetic and weak-nuclear forces into an electroweak theory was one of the major breakthroughs of 20th century particle physics. In the 1960s, Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam proposed that these two…
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October-December 2024
Candidate event for the ZH → μμ cc process, where a Z boson and a Higgs boson decay to two muons (red tracks) and two charm-tagged jets (blue cones). (Image: ATLAS collaboration) In the summer of 2024, the ATLAS collaboration released two new…
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October-December 2024
Lead is an abundant element of the solar system and is particularly abundant on the Earth’s crust (Figure 1). The origin of three of its four stable isotopes (206Pb, 207Pb, and 208Pb) can be partially traced back to the decay of uranium and thorium…
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