The discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments was announced in CERN’s main auditorium in July 2012. Here, finally, was the missing piece in the standard model describing our universe. For some, it was the culmination of over 40 years’ work. This champagne bottle was drunk by members of CERN’s Theoretical physics group on the occasion.

This antimatter trap is used at the Antimatter decelerator to study atoms of antimatter. Electrically-charged antimatter can be trapped in this device, also called a Penning trap. The Penning trap requires an ultrahigh vacuum. Inside the trap, magnetic fields force the charged antiparticles to spiral around the magnetic field lines, and electric fields confine them along the magnetic axis. Even though at the beginning of the universe, antimatter has been produced in equal quantity with matter, it now seems to have completely disappeared.

CELESTA (CERN Latch-up Experiment Student Satellite) will be the first CERN-driven microsatellite, developed in collaboration with the University of Montpellier in the framework of a collaboration agreement defined and signed in 2015. The project, supported through the KT Fund, has two main objectives: one is developing and flying a space version of CERN radiation monitor (RadMon) coupled with a latch-up experiment; the second is showing that the space radiation environment of Low Earth Orbit can be reproduced in the CERN High energy AcceleRator Mixed field facility (CHARM). This would open the use for space system qualification activities, and provide a radiation monitor module for future missions.

A beautiful module of tracker from the CMS experiment, made up of silicon.

42 modules like this one surround the collision point inside the LHCb detector. Their role is to measure the tracks of short-lived particles spraying out from the collision and to pinpoint the exact spots where they decay into secondary particles. Some exist for just trillionths of a second before decaying! The silicon modules operate so close to the collision point, they can only be moved into position once the circling particle beams are at their most focused. Otherwise, peripheral particles on the outside of the finer-than-a-hair beam would bore a hole right through them.

A magnet surrounding the detectors bends the paths of charged particles. This shows if they are positively - or negatively- charged and also allows their momentum to be measured. Inside ATLAS, the solenoid magnet surrounding the tracking detectors must be as thin as possible, so as not to affect their measurements. 9 km of superconducting wires, support casing, cooling fluids and insulation is squeezed into the 4.5 cm gap between the tracking detectors and the calorimeters. ATLAS is one of the 4 large experiments surrounding collision points at the Large Hadron Collider.