Welcome to the digital edition of the January/February 2025 issue of CERN Courier.

Particle physicists are always doing things that have never been done before. So says the subject of this month’s interview, Mark Thomson, who in December was given a five-year mandate to be Director-General of CERN, starting in January 2026 (p38). “Unfolding” with artificial intelligence is a great example, allowing experimenters to remove detector distortions from complex multidimensional data rather than just a couple of variables (p20).

In his interview, Thomson also champions fluidity between academia and industry. This month’s careers article explores entrepreneurship that embodies the ideals of academia (p44), and our feature on space technologies highlights how CERN and the European Space Agency collaborate to spark the growing space economy (p26).

Alexandra Ridziková’s stunning cover highlights the experimental pursuit of a fundamental feature of gluon dynamics, showing the proton entering the regime of “gluon saturation”. The first proton shows a handful of so-called gluonic hotspots carrying roughly 1% of the proton’s momentum. The following eight delve down to a Bjorken x of 10–6, where more than 70 hotspots overlap and gluons recombine as often as they split in two. Gluon saturation could be discovered as soon as the next run of the LHC (p31).

Elsewhere on these pages: a new project to demonstrate muon cooling kicks-off at Fermilab (p13); Sheldon Glashow recalls a remarkable decade of discovery (p35); and how energy-efficient RF will reduce electricity bills at colliders (p16).

j CERN Courier January/February 2025