A communication resource from the world's particle physics laboratories.
View of the Milky Way above CERN (Credit: Aude Nowak/CERN)
Private donors pledge 860 million euros for CERN’s Future Circular Collider
For the first time in CERN’s history, private donors (individuals and philanthropic foundations) have agreed to support a CERN flagship research project. Recently, a group of friends of CERN, including the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and the entrepreneurs John Elkann and Xavier Niel, have pledged significant funds towards the construction of the Future Circular Collider (FCC), the potential successor of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These potential contributions, totalling some 860 million euros and corresponding to 1 billion US dollars, would represent a major private sector investment in the advancement of research in fundamental physics.
Artistic representation of the tunnel for the Future Circular Collider (image: PIXELRISE)
The European Strategy for Particle Physics reaches an important milestone
At its 225th session, the CERN Council received the recommendations for the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, the aim of which is to develop a common vision for the future of the field. The recommendations will be reviewed by the Council in the coming months. A final decision is expected at a dedicated Council Session in Budapest in May 2026.
Illustration of how deuterons can be produced from a high-energy collision at the LHC. A delta particle emerging from the collision decays into a proton and a pion. The proton undergoes nuclear fusion with a neutron to form deuteron (Image: CERN)
ALICE solves mystery of light-nuclei survival
Particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can reach temperatures over one hundred thousand times hotter than at the centre of the Sun. Yet, somehow, light atomic nuclei and their antimatter counterparts emerge from this scorching environment unscathed, even though the bonds holding the nuclei together would normally be expected to break at a much lower temperature. Physicists have puzzled for decades over how this is possible, but now the ALICE collaboration has provided experimental evidence of how it happens, with its results published today in Nature.
Photomultiplier tubes inside the LZ detector are designed to capture faint flashes of UV light that could signal a dark matter interaction.(Credit: Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility)
LZ Sets a World’s Best in the Hunt for Galactic Dark Matter and Gets a New Look at Neutrinos from the Sun’s Core
There’s more to the universe than meets the eye. Dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for 85 percent of the mass in the universe, is hiding all around us — and figuring out exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about how our world works. The newest results from LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) extend the experiment’s search for low-mass dark matter and set world-leading limits on one of the prime dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. They also mark the first time LZ has picked up signals from neutrinos from the sun, a milestone in sensitivity.
Previous experiments indicated where a fourth neutrino may be observed. MicroBooNE scientists have ruled out the region where a single sterile neutrino may have been found with 95% certainty. The collaboration combined data collected from two different neutrino beams to achieve this result. Credit: MicroBooNE collaboration
MicroBooNE finds no evidence for a sterile neutrino
Scientists on the MicroBooNE experiment further ruled out the possibility of one sterile neutrino as an explanation for results from previous experiments. In the latest MicroBooNE result, the collaboration used one detector and two beams to study neutrino behavior, ruling out the single sterile neutrino model with 95% certainty.
Artistic representation of the tunnel for the Future Circular Collider (image: PIXELRISE)
CERN Council reviews feasibility study for a next-generation collider
Particle colliders are unique instruments that allow the smallest constituents of matter and the laws of the universe to be studied at the most fundamental level. CERN and its partners in Europe and worldwide are currently working to identify the next collider that would succeed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after the latter reaches the end of operations in 2041.
Illustration of the ion trap used by the ISOLDE team to measure the electron affinity of chlorine. In the trap, chlorine anions are reflected back and forth between two electrostatic ion mirrors, allowing the laser beam (pink) to probe the anions for much longer than in conventional measurements. The laser frequency is tuned to find the exact photon energy above which the extra electron (small white circle) is removed from the anion.
(Image: MIRACLS collaboration)
Ion recycling to illuminate the heaviest elements
From the burning of wood to the action of medicines, the properties and behaviour of matter are governed by the way chemical elements bond with one another. For many of the 118 known elements, the intricate electronic structures of the atoms that are responsible for chemical bonding are well understood. But for the superheavy elements lying at the far edge of the periodic table, measuring even a single property of these exotic species is a major challenge.
Fig. 1 : T2K in Japan (left) and NOvA in the United States (right) are both long-baseline experiments: they each shoot an intense beam of neutrinos that passes through both a near detector close to the neutrino source and a far detector hundreds of kilometers away. Both experiments compare data recorded in each detector to learn about neutrinos’ behavior and properties.
“Rival” neutrino experiments NOvA and T2K publish first joint analysis
The T2K experiment in Japan and the NOvA experiment in the United States conducted a joint analysis and published their first results in the journal Nature. Both are long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments using accelerators, and by leveraging their different baselines and energy conditions, they achieved precision measurements of neutrino oscillations. As a result, they succeeded in reducing the uncertainty in the differences between neutrino masses to below 2%. Although the ordering of the three neutrino masses is still unknown, their results show that depending on this ordering, the magnitude of CP symmetry violation—a difference in behavior between particles and antiparticles—would be strongly constrained.
Ireland has officially become an Associate Member State of CERN, following confirmation that it has taken all the necessary steps to ratify the Associate Membership Agreement and accede to the protocol on CERN’s privileges and immunities. The starting date of Ireland’s status as an Associate Member State is 22 October 2025.
The CUORE detector has 19 copper-framed “towers” that each house a matrix of 52 cube-shaped crystals. Credit: Yury Suvorov/CUORE collaboration
New Data Release From CUORE Features A “Noise-Canceling” Algorithm
The coldest cubic meter in the universe is the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events, or CUORE. This chilly nuclear physics experiment looks for tiny fluctuations in temperature from a never-before-seen process called “neutrinoless double beta decay,” which could help explain why our universe is full of matter. That extreme sensitivity means CUORE also records other activity, too: the sounds of scientists talking, the pulse of waves crashing on the shore 50 kilometers away, and earthquakes on the other side of the world.
On and around October 31st, 2025, the world will celebrate the historic hunt for the unseen—something that scientists refer to as dark matter.
Since 2017, more than 350 global, regional, and local events have been held on and around October 31 by institutions and individuals looking to engage the public in discussions about what we already know about dark matter and the many experiments seeking to solve its mysteries.
Follow the Dark Matter Day on social media with #DarkMatterDay
2018 winner 1st place – Simon Wright, STFC Boulby Underground Laboratory, UK
2025 Global Physics Photowalk
Several of the world’s leading science laboratories will open their doors to amateur and professional photographers as they join together to host the Global Physics Photowalk competition.
The Photowalk will give participants a rare opportunity to visit and photograph physics facilities in Asia, Europe and North America — and to get a behind-the-scenes look at where the world’s most exciting science is being carried out today.
Follow the Photowalk on social media with #PhysPics25
There's more of the universe that we don't understand than we do understand. Ordinary matter—the stuff that scientists have spent decades studying—makes up around five percent of the universe. The remainder is thought to be comprised of dark energy (around 70 percent) and dark matter (around 25 percent). What is all this dark stuff and how do we know it's there if we can't even see it directly?
We know that dark matter exists because it acts on the cosmos in a number of ways. In the 1930s, an astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky realized that, in order to act the way they do, galaxy clusters must contain a lot more mass than was actually visible. If the galaxies also contained unseen "dark" matter, everything made a lot more sense. Then, in the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that stars at the edge of a galaxy move just as quickly as stars near the center. This observation makes sense if the visible stars were surrounded by a halo of something invisible: dark matter. Since then, a number of other astronomical observations have confirmed the effects of dark matter.
