Physicists can be allies, wrote Wassily Kandinsky, “who test matter again and again, who tremble before no problem, and who finally cast doubt on that very matter which was yesterday the foundation of everything, so that the whole universe is shaken.”

This edition of CERN Courier offers two examples of physics to shake the universe. Each spontaneously breaks the symmetry of a field, plunging the vacuum into a potential well shaped like the rim of a hat, releasing a torrent of energy into the universe.

Peccei–Quinn symmetry breaking would explain the fine tuning of the Standard Model to produce no CP violation in the strong interaction, while also yielding a dark-matter candidate, the QCD axion. Two ingenious experiments are smashing the limits of cavity haloscopes to search for the QCD axion over the next 10 years.

Electroweak symmetry breaking is thought to have given mass to elementary particles. Its smoking gun was the Higgs boson, but very little is known about how it took place in the early universe. Much depends on the shape of the Higgs potential, which we have barely even begun to probe. In this issue, Valentina Cairo and Steven Lowette explore what can be learnt at the High-Luminosity LHC.

These projections provide an important input to the 2026 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The biggest decision concerns seven large-scale collider projects that the community has proposed as possible successors to the High-Luminosity LHC. Like Kandinsky’s geometric constructivism at the Bauhaus, they are a harmony of lines, arcs and circles.

Read the digital edition of this new issue on the CERN Courier website.

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