CERN Courier Jul/Aug 2020

Preparations for the DUNE cavern at Sanford Underground Research Facility, South Dakota.
Preparations for the DUNE cavern at Sanford Underground Research Facility, South Dakota. (Image: Matthew Kapust/SURF)

Welcome to the digital edition of the July/August 2020 issue of CERN Courier.

From giant detectors at the receiving end of artificial neutrino beams to vast sub-ice or subsea arrays and smaller setups investigating whether neutrinos are Majorana particles, neutrino experiments span an enormous range of types, scales and locations. Today, as explored in this issue, a new generation of reactor and accelerator experiments – including DUNE in the US, Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan and JUNO in China – are gearing up to complete the measurements of neutrino-oscillation parameters and establish the neutrino mass ordering. Meanwhile, a series of shorter baseline experiments are scrutinising the three-neutrino paradigm.

Coordinated global action has seen Europe, via the CERN neutrino platform, participate in the long-baseline neutrino programmes in Japan and the US. This has proved a major success. The 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics, released on 19 June, recommends that the neutrino platform receives continued support. Its highest priority recommendations are to pursue an electron–positron Higgs factory to follow the LHC, and that Europe explores the feasibility of a future energy-frontier hadron collider with a Higgs factory as a possible first stage. These are exciting times, and this month’s Viewpoint also calls on particle physicists to highlight the broader socioeconomic impact of our field.

Elsewhere in this issue: a global network of ultra-sensitive magnetometers called GNOME homes in on exotic fields; neutron facilities prepare to study the structure of SARS-CoV-2; graphene-based Hall probes trialled at CERN; reports on the virtual IPAC and LHCP events; CLOUD experiment breaks new ground in atmospheric science; and much more.

j CERN Courier Jul/Aug 2020