ATLAS and CMS awarded for the discovery of a Higgs boson

In July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced the discovery of a new heavy particle at a mass around 125 GeV. Its properties were strikingly similar to those of a Higgs boson, a long-sought particle expected from the mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking that was introduced almost 50 years ago by Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs.

Experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson presented monumental challenges because of its relatively large…

International Master classes in Particle Physics

Master classes are a unique opportunity for high-school students, where they can hunt particles at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and analyse real data from the experiments. Each year, in spring, research institutes and universities around the world open their doors and invite students for daylong visits. This year’s International Master classes were organized in March, under the auspices of the International Particle Physics Outreach Groups [IPPOG], and attracted more than 10 000 students.
In the Master class, students gained insight into the international organization of modern research in…

European Strategy in Particle Physics

Since 2007, the High Energy Particle Physics Board of the European Physics Society (EPS) and the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) have been organising jointly a half-day plenary session during the biannual EPS conference on High Energy Physics. This year’s session, which took place in Grenoble in the afternoon of 23 September, marked the start of the process for updating the European strategy in particle physics.

The first European strategy for particle physics was adopted by a special session of the CERN Council in July 2006. The Strategy was defined by 17 statements that were approved by Council and were contained in the Strategy Statement…

Report from EPS HEP 2011

Impressive results, so early on, and so much more yet to come! This was the prevalent feeling among the 800+ attendees of the EPS-HEP bi-annual meeting, held at the end of July, in Grenoble.

The spectacular performance of the Large Hadron Collider, which within a year has delivered the integrated luminosity milestone of one inverse femtobarn, along with the very fast analysis of the data by the experiments, was a leading actor at the conference. In parallel, with the Tevatron approaching the finalization of its physics program…