Magazine

Fifty years ago, the first proton–proton collisions at CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings opened the era of hadron colliders. This bold technological leap led to increasingly powerful machines, from the SppS to the Tevatron and finally the LHC – with an immense scientific payoff punctuated by the discoveries of the W and Z bosons, the top quark and the Higgs boson. This issue also describes ingenious attempts to search for physics hailing from energy scales beyond the reach of any collider imaginable – and much more, from the first evidence for a rare “Dalitz” decay of the Higgs boson and new results from the CLOUD experiment at CERN, to the use of quantum sensors to detect gravitational waves and the latest twist in the tale of the ATOMKI anomaly. Don’t forget to sign up for future new-issue alerts here.