CERN Courier May/June 2023

Front cover of the CERN Courier May/Jun 2023
The "python": a high-temperature superconducting link for the HL-LHC.

Welcome to the digital edition of the May/June 2023 issue of CERN Courier.

Meet “the python” – one of eight 60m-long high-temperature superconducting links to power new magnets for the High-Luminosity LHC. Developed at CERN via a multi-disciplinary approach and in collaboration with industry, the technology has also been used to demonstrate record power-transmission capability for electricity grids, and is being explored for use in electric aircraft.

This year’s Recontres de Moriond saw the announcement of the first collider neutrinos (p9), improved measurements of the W mass (p10), new limits on Majorana neutrinos (p9), ever tighter constraints on the properties of dark matter (p15), and much more. While the Standard Model stands strong, ingenious new ways to go beyond it include searches at CERN’s NA62 experiment operating in “beam-dump” mode (p11). This issue also marks 60 years since Cabibbo’s seminal paper on quark mixing (p43), and 50 years since Kobayashi and Maskawa generalised the description of quark mixing to three generations (p23).

Muons for cultural heritage (p32) and colliders (p47), a new user facility for plasma acceleration (p25), CERN’s Science Gateway (p49) and “exotic naturalness” (p21) are further highlights, as high-energy collisions recommence at LHC Run 3 (p8).

j CERN Courier May/June 2023