Happy 2025 to you all! I wish you, as well as your families, a year filled with health, happiness and success. May this year also bring well-being and personal fulfilment and growth to each of you.
In 2025, we have exciting new challenges to tackle and many opportunities to seize. And I am confident that, together, we will continue to make CERN and our field shine.
In the New Year presentation on 14 January, the Directors and I gave a few examples of the great accomplishments in 2024. The year saw the extraordinary performance of the accelerator complex, the experiments and the computing. It was the best production year for proton–proton physics at the LHC ever, and the experiments collected about 220 PB of raw data, compared to about 100 PB in 2023. Many beautiful physics results were produced across the full scientific programme.
CERN’s 70th anniversary was celebrated with a variety of events at CERN and in 33 countries, including an event for the CERN community on 17 September and the ceremony with political authorities on 1 October. CERN Science Gateway, in its first year, attracted more than 388 000 visitors from 175 countries and featured as THE place to visit by media worldwide.
Looking to the year ahead, the top five objectives set by the Enlarged Directorate are as follows:
- Comply with the new schedule for the HL-LHC: The accelerator schedule was updated in 2024, with the start of the HL-LHC pushed back by one year. Our first priority for 2025 is to maintain this schedule. Work on the accelerator and experiment upgrades and preparation for the immense amount of work to be carried out in Long Shutdown 3 (LS3) should be the major focus.
- Successful and safe operation of accelerators, experiments and computing: Preliminary luminosity targets for 2025 have been set and will be finalised at the Chamonix Workshop 2025 in late January.
- Complete the FCC Feasibility Study: Great progress has been made across all aspects of the Study, and the final report should be completed by 31 March 2025.
- European Strategy for Particle Physics: The update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics will be a major effort, and strong participation, notably from our young colleagues, is needed to ensure a brilliant future for CERN.
- Finalise the implementation of CERN’s main objectives for 2021–2025: these include, in addition to scientific goals, aspects such as industrial and human resources return to Member and Associate Member States, personnel well-being, training, education and outreach, environment and sustainability and CERN’s impact on society.
During 2025, CERN’s organisational structure and Management for the period 2026–2030 will be established by the Director-General-elect, Mark Thomson, and I look forward to a smooth transition at the end of 2025.
2024 was a spectacular year for the Laboratory and its worldwide community and I would like to thank each one of you for your hard work, dedication and commitment to CERN. You have accomplished phenomenal achievements, and I look forward to another year of great success with all of you. I wish you and your loved ones a fantastic 2025.