Thanks!

This is my last message to CERN personnel as Director-General, and the overriding sentiment I’d like to pass on is ‘thank you’: it has been a fantastic seven years. I’ve been privileged to be DG through amazing times, and thanks to the efforts of many we are at the threshold of a golden era for our field. 

Over seven years, the thank-yous add up, and I’d like to start by thanking the CERN Council for entrusting me with the best job in the world of particle physics and for providing constant support throughout my mandate. The Council and the Management do not always agree, and that is how it should be: each is subject to different boundary conditions, and priorities vary. Nevertheless, it has been a partnership in which discussions have been conducted constructively and differences resolved amicably. CERN is stronger because of it.

I’d like to thank the CERN staff, whose often-invisible efforts keep the wheels turning in all areas from the seamless delivery of beams to the administration of all the complex tasks that come with being a major intergovernmental organisation. While I’m speaking of staff, I’d also like to say how much I have appreciated the relationship between the Management and the Staff Association. Despite differing opinions, we have established and maintained a relationship characterised by mutual trust and respect.

Not all the essential functions of CERN are carried out by staff however, so I’d also like to thank the contractors, whose tasks range from site security to ensuring our offices and laboratories are clean, and our plates are full at lunchtime.

CERN’s primary mission is, of course, research. As well as carrying out research ourselves, we are here for our users, who repay us royally in the form of reams of fantastic new physics. The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism is the cherry on the cake, and it has helped whet the world’s appetite for physics. Over the last few years, Quark Gluon Plasma, pentaquarks, antimatter and baryon resonances have all made headlines. Long may this continue.

Nor should we forget our theorists. Although CERN is primarily an experimental physics centre, theory plays a vital part in the intellectual life of the Laboratory. Our theorists are indispensable to CERN and play a valuable role in training the future intellects that will drive our field forward in the years and decades to come.

Thanks are also due to the world’s particle physics laboratories and institutions. Over the timespan of my mandate, the world of particle physics has got much closer. Today, it feels very much like a global collaboration.

I’d like to turn now to what you have achieved over the last seven years. Thanks to the bottom-up European Strategy process, Europe has a coherent, evolving and globally-integrated strategy that will steer us through the LHC era and set us up for what’s to follow. This is fully consistent with the US and Japanese strategies, and is set to evolve at the next update around 2018. The CERN family has grown with new Member and Associate Member States, and that growth is set to continue.

Scientifically, of course, the highlight has been the spectacular performance of our flagship, the LHC, along with its detectors and computing infrastructure. Run 1 gave us the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, leading to a Nobel Prize, and Run 2 is off to a brilliant start. Most of our facilities have seen upgrades, for example with the HIE-ISOLDE facility that recently came on-stream, ensuring that our veteran ion-beam facility remains competitive. We have also enlarged our scientific portfolio beyond the borders of Europe, and we’ve even extended the age range of our research community downwards by making a PS beam available to school groups who come to CERN for a couple of weeks a year. The first CERN Beamline for Schools competition winners are about to submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal and I have high hopes for future cohorts.

CERN has always been a very open organisation, as our convention obliges us to be. But now we have gone further by pushing the frontiers of open-access publishing, making our datasets openly available and reaching out to new communities in the realms of the arts, philosophy and religion. The results, I believe, can only be good for science.

There’s much more that I could say about your achievements, but time and space are limited and I would like to end with those words again: thank you. Your achievements make me proud to be part of this community, humbled and honoured to have had the privilege of leading this fantastic institution for the last seven years, and satisfied that I am leaving a laboratory that’s in fine form, and for this I’d especially like to thank the outgoing Management team, and everyone among you.

Finally, I wish you and your families a wonderful end-of-year break and a fabulous 2016. And I’d like to thank the incoming Management team for all they've done to ensure a smooth transition. I wish Fabiola Gianotti, her team and all of you a successful future, crowned with wonderful new physics. I, for one, can’t wait. 

Rolf Heuer