CERN Courier Sep/Oct 2025
Welcome to the digital edition of the September/October 2025 issue of CERN Courier.
The quark model. The Ω–. The cosmic microwave background. Charm. The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism. CP violation. Colour. 1964 was a remarkable year for invention and discovery (p30). The story of quarkonia began one year earlier, in 1963. As the ATLAS collaboration joins CMS in reporting an excess near the top–antitop production threshold (p9), John Ellis asks whether quarkonia’s final chapter is now being written (p35).
In 2025, the community has the opportunity to shape strategic investments for decades to come. CERN Council president Costas Fountas and European strategy secretary Karl Jakobs report a growing consensus on the future of the field (p24).
The cover is a classic photograph of the OPAL detector at LEP – just one of the historic experiments whose software and data are being given a new lease of life, decades after data-taking ended. As the LHC surpasses one exabyte of stored data, Cristinel Diaconu and Ulrich Schwickerath call for new collaborations to join a global effort in data preservation, to allow future generations to unearth the hidden treasures (p41).
Elsewhere in these pages: should dark energy evolve? (p47); scalable technology for precision neutrino physics with small detectors (p7); tips from IBM’s head of science and technology on how to get a job in industry (p53); an update on the ATOMKI anomaly (p8); Andreas Hoecker’s highlights from EPS–HEP (p17); and much more.