Particle Physics 2013.

The year 2013 was remarkably eventful for particle and astroparticle physics at DESY. The new particle discovered in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was identified as a Higgs boson, and consequently the fathers of the Higgs mechanism, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other projects in particle physics, like the planned International Linear Collider (ILC) or the Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB collider in Japan, reached major milestones and received considerable attention. In astroparticle physics, the confirmation of extragalactic neutrinos, as discovered by the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole, presented a major achievement. In parallel to all the work leading up to these physics successes, DESY has been preparing for the next five-year funding period of the Helmholtz Association, which will start in 2015.