CERN Courier

Ezio Todesco charts the future of high-field dipole magnets – a technology set to advance the boundaries of high-energy physics and the societal applications of superconductivity. Frontier superconductors A closeup of a Nb3Sn wire and a 4 mm-wide REBCO tape. Both conductors can carry 500 A, but REBCO, a high-temperature superconductor, can withstand fields well in excess of 20 tesla at temperatures above 10 K.

After a moment of turbulence, Norbert Holtkamp returns to Fermilab with a clear mandate: deliver DUNE, honour the laboratory’s legacy of bold leadership and reaffirm big science’s responsibility to society. Project person Norbert Holtkamp was appointed Fermilab’s new director in December 2025.

Commercial software can’t keep pace with experimental precision when it comes to large-scale computer-algebra calculations in quantum field theory. Maintained by a single theorist for decades, FORM is often the only option, underpinning a remarkable fraction of papers in high-energy physics. The Courier interviewed key figures from its past, present and future. The inventor Jos Vermaseren, Nikhef. Credit: J Vermaseren Jos, FORM has been at the heart of precision calculations for decades.

Spot the dot Little red dots appear in every pointing of the JWST imaging camera NIRCam. Credit: UNCOVER (PIs: I Labbe and R Bezanson) Every new instrument needs its mysteries, and no discovery of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been more surprising than the “little red dots” it discovered in the early universe. Four years after their discovery, their nature is still an open question, with new papers purporting to solve the mystery on an almost daily basis.

Six out of 1339 Six anomalous images of galaxies identified by artificial intelligence, including: a galactic merger (top right); a “collisional ring” galaxy that has been smashed by a secondary galaxy in a perfectly aligned interaction (top left); a galaxy resembling the Starship Enterprise that defies classification (bottom left); and three gravitational lenses with arcs distorted by gravity (top middle, bottom middle and bottom right).

James Robinson reflects on a journey from the ATLAS collaboration to the Environment and Sustainability programme at the Alan Turing Institute. James Robinson is the software engineering research lead at the Alan Turing Institute’s Environment and Sustainability programme. Credit: Alan Turing Institute In physics, as in life, it’s important to persevere in the face of setbacks. When James Robinson joined the ATLAS experiment at CERN in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider had just sputtered into life.

Michael S Turner argues that the next breakthrough in particle physics and cosmology may be just around the corner. Michael S Turner is an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA and an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago. He recently co-chaired the US National Academies’ study of the future of US particle physics, Elementary Particle Physics: The Higgs and Beyond.

Eiffel honour The women set to be honoured include (clockwise from top left): Marie Skłodowska Curie, Yvette Cauchois, Toshiko Yuasa, Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat, Cécile DeWitt-Morette, Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Lydie Koch.

Modern methods Researchers are converging on a common set of tools for string theory, holography and quantum gravity. Credit: IGFAE One hundred researchers gathered in Santiago de Compostela from 21 to 23 January for Iberian Strings, the annual meeting of the vibrant Spanish and Portuguese string theory community.

Cool magnets CERN has begun the cooldown of a 95 m-long test stand that reproduces the underground configuration of technologies for the Large Hadron Collider’s high-luminosity upgrade.