Charting a course for advanced accelerators
Progress in experimental particle physics is driven by advances in accelerators. The conversion of storage rings into colliders in the 1970s is one example, another is the use of superconducting magne...
Xenon beams light path to gamma factory
On 14 September, CERN injected a beam of partially ionised xenon atoms into the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and kept it circulating for a short period. The successful demonstration, carried out by ...
CLEAR prospects for accelerator research
A new user facility for accelerator R&D, the CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR), started operation in August and is ready to provide beam for experiments. CLEAR evolved from the...
China neutron source sees first beam
In late August, the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) produced its first neutron beam, representing an important milestone for the $280 million project. The world’s fourth pulsed spallation neu...
Injecting new life into the LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most famous and powerful of all CERN’s machines, colliding intense beams of protons at an energy of 13 TeV. But its success relies on a series of smaller mac...
ITER’s massive magnets enter production
As Matthew Chalmers reported in 2017, completion of the first toroidal-field coil for ITER demonstrates niobium-tin superconductor technology on a gigantic scale.
Taming high-temperature superconductivity
Superconductivity is perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of quantum physics on the macroscopic scale. Discovered in 1911 by Kamerlingh Onnes, it preoccupied the most prominent physicists of the ...
Celebrating a super partnership
The virtuous spiral between high-energy physics and superconductivity is never ending, says Lucio Rossi.
Revamped HIE-ISOLDE serves experiments
CERN’s long-running radioactive-ion-beam facility ISOLDE, which produces beams for a wide range of scientific communities, has recently been upgraded to allow higher-energy beams. In July, the secon...
Powering the field forward
Particle physicists try to understand the environment that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang by studying the behaviour of particles at high energies. Early studies relied on cosmic rays...
