Tag: CERN Courier
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The September/October 2026 issue of the CERN Courier is out
In his landmark 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that basic research is the fund from which applications, and with them prosperity, are drawn. Eight decades on, the High-Luminosity LHC is expected to return to society nearly twice its cost, before a single discovery is counted. The largest share comes from the skills
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NA64, a decade of hunting dark matter
In particle physics, energy is never lost. When particles collide or decay, all the initial energy they carry must be conserved in the resulting products, and a shortfall signals that something has escaped unseen. It was the energy missing from radioactive decays that led Wolfgang Pauli to propose the neutrino in 1930, a particle so elusive that it evaded detection for
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The July/August 2026 issue of the CERN Courier is out
When the Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP) switched on, in 1989, the field had never worked at such a scale. Approved eight years earlier, it collided electrons and positrons until the turn of the century, marking two decades in which discovery truly turned global. Last November, some 200 physicists and historians gathered at CERN to take stock
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The January/February 2026 issue of the CERN Courier is out
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.
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CLIC technology for compact light sources
X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), the latest generation of synchrotron-radiation sources, are as sought-after as they’re scarce. The X-rays emitted by the electrons inside these linear accelerators are of precious help for research and medicine, but their high cost and complexity have meant that only a few such facilities are currently in operation worldwide. CompactLight, an