Discovering diamonds
Natural diamonds are old, almost as old as the planet itself. They mostly originated in the Earth’s mantle around 1 to 3.5 billion years ago and typically were brought to the surface during deep and...
CMS undergoes tracker transplant
At the beginning of March, the CMS collaboration successfully replaced the heart of its detector: the pixel tracker. This innermost layer of the CMS detector, a cylindrical device containing 124 milli...
Looking forward to photon–photon physics
As its name suggests, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN smashes hadrons into one another – protons, to be precise. The energy from these collisions gets converted into matter, producing new pa...
Funding injection for SNOLAB
The SNOLAB laboratory in Ontario, Canada, has received a grant of $28.6m to help secure its next three years of operations. The facility is one of 17 research facilities to receive support through Can...
ProtoDUNE revealed
This 11 m-high structure with thick steel walls will soon contain a prototype detector for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a major international project based in the US for studying...
Crystal Clear celebrates 25 years of success
The Crystal Clear (CC) collaboration was approved by CERN’s Detector Research and Development Committee in April 1991 as experiment RD18. Its objective was to develop new inorganic scintillators tha...
CERN explores opportunities for physics beyond colliders
Our understanding of nature’s fundamental constituents owes much to particle colliders. Notable discoveries include the W and Z bosons at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron in the 1980s, the top qua...
AIDA-2020 calls for breakthrough detector technologies
The European Union project AIDA-2020 (Advanced European Infrastructure for Detectors and Accelerators), in which CERN is a partner, has launched a proof-of-concept fund for breakthrough projects in th...
Storage ring steps up search for electric dipole moments
The fact that we and the world around us are made of matter and only minimal amounts of antimatter is one of the fundamental puzzles in modern physics, motivating a variety of theoretical speculations...
IceCube seeks to expand
The IceCube experiment at the South Pole has been one of the pioneers of the field of neutrino astronomy. During a seven-year-long construction campaign that ended in 2010, the 325 strong IceC...
