CERN researchers outline their work plan for the coming years

The future of particle physics in Europe has reached a new milestone. In Venice, between June 23 and 27, discussions among 600 scientists and more than 260 written contributions informed the group tasked with developing recommendations to the Council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which will be submitted in early 2026.

CERN will decide a few months later, in May, on its new strategy for the coming years. Its sights will be set on building a new particle accelerator three times longer than its predecessor, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located on the French-Swiss border. In 2012, the latter discovered the last missing particle in the picture that describes particle interactions: the Higgs boson .

Doubts remain, because physicists do not know what new theory could allow them to answer very fundamental questions about the nature of matter and energy that structure the Universe (so-called "dark" matter and energy), or about the weakness of the mass of neutrinos... Increasing the energy of collisions between particles and better understanding the Higgs boson, by producing large quantities and measuring its properties more precisely, therefore appears necessary and will require a new machine. But which one?

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