LTP: Laboratory for Particle Physics

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the strongest explosions in the Universe since the Big Bang. They are believed to be produced either in the formation of black holes at the end of massive star evolution or the merging of compact objects.

Solid deuterium (sD₂) is used as an efficient converter to produce ultracold neutrons (UCN). Itis known that the sD₂ must be sufficiently cold, of high purity and mostly in its ortho-state in order to guarantee long lifetimes of UCN in the solid from which they are extracted into vacuum.

The observation of Higgs boson production in association with a top quark-antiquark pair is reported, based on a combined analysis of proton-proton collision data at center-of-mass energies of √s = 7,8, and 13 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1, 19.7, and 35.9 fb^-1, respectively. The data were collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC.

In recent years, intriguing hints for the violation of lepton flavor universality (LFU) have been accumulated in semileptonic B decays, both in the charged-current transitions b → cl^-ν^-_l (i.e., R_D, R_D∗, and R_J/Ψ and the neutral-current transitions b → sl⁺l^- (i.e., R_K and R_K∗.

The Charpak-Ritz Prize 2018, jointly awarded by the French Physical Society and the Swiss Physical Society, has been bestowed to Roland Paul Horisberger for his numerous contributions to the development of precision silicon vertex detectors for particle physics experiments as well as for the application of these technologies in X-ray photon sciences.