Two lessons from ICHEP
Image: Me chairing a session on searches for particles beyond the Standard Model at ICHEP 2026. Photo by Giuliano Gustavino. About a month ago, I attended the “International Conference on High Energy Physics” (or ICHEP for short), which is the largest conference in the field and happens every two years. In contrast to Moriond, which…
The LHC is dead. Long live the HL-LHC!
Image: A screen shot of the “LHC Page 1” (accessible here), which is our real-time window on LHC operation (or lack thereof). This page is shown on screen all around CERN, including, most importantly, the coffee area. It’s now been three weeks since the LHC collided its last hadrons. After a bumpy start in 2008,…
The machines are coming to steal our jobs (kidding, but let’s use them properly)
Image: You may be surprised that this illustration I have used was not AI generated! It has been used in literally dozens of web articles dealing with AI and jobs, but none give any citation for the original artist. Doing a reverse image search, the earliest use of it I find is 2013 (long before…
The Look Elsewhere Effect in the age of AI
Image: A fascinating plot from the days where the first hints of the Higgs boson started to appear in early LHC data by CMS [Publication]. In addition to the actual Higgs boson peak, the plot shows “evidence” (at the 3σ level) for two other particles, with masses around 140 and 170 GeV). These turned out…
The ATLAS search community is coming to Clermont-Ferrand!
Image: A graphic I used in my interview for my job as junior professor at Université Clermont Auvergne. It’s an adaptation of “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich, but I photoshopped out the fog in favour of the beautiful Chaîne des Puys which Clermont-Ferrand is nestled in. About a month ago,…
An ode to Moriond
Image: The conference photo for the 60th edition of the “Rencontres de Moriond: Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories”. I’m somewhere on the left side of the zero. Credit: Moriond. This March, I had the pleasure of attending the “Rencontres de Moriond: Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories” conference (“Moriond” for short). It is one of the…
If Particle Physics were a railway, who would lay the track and who would drive the trains?
Image: LHC magnet being assembled. If Particle Physics were a railway, CERN would be in charge of laying and maintaining the tracks and signalling. Image © CERN. This weekend, I’ve been visiting some friends from my university days. While catching up, they asked me a question which I get a lot: are you still working…
High Energy Physics is a generational project
Image: The planned location of the Future Circular Collider at CERN. Credit: CERN. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the entire field of particle physics is less than 130 years old. I pick as a starting point the date that we discovered our first fundamental particle: the electron (discovered in 1897 by J. J. Thompson).…
Five things we learned about fundamental particle physics in 2025
Image: Louie preaching to the converted (during a visit of his masters students to ALICE experiment at CERN in December 2025). Credit: Adrien Auriol. I would like to dedicate this post to the memory of Deepak Kar, who passed away tragically last week after a short illness. We co-organised the CHACAL school together, and I…
What it takes to build a detector
Image: the High Granularity Timing Detector and where it will fit within ATLAS. (Credit: ATLAS collaboration) Last week, I travelled to Lyon to give an overview of the status of the ATLAS High Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD) upgrade project for the leaders of the IN2P3 (the French particle and nuclear physics institute). For each major…
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