Just over a year ago I was up a mountain, in fog and hail, at the South-Western tip of Sicily. Along with about fifty other delegates, I was discussing the future of particle physics. This was the Erice meeting where we drafted the update of the European Strategy for particle physics. Although the meeting was convened by the council of CERN, it concerned much more than the future of the laboratory in Geneva that currently runs the Large Hadron Collider - the 27km circumference accelerator where the Higgs boson was recently discovered.
The year 2012 saw not only the Higgs boson discovery, but also the measurement of a key parameter, θ₁₃, describing the way that neutrinos behave, and numerous other significant results. These results have a big impact of what we might do next in our exploration of fundamental physics. From days of argument in the cold, stone-floored rooms of Erice, four large high-priority projects emerged. There has been news recently on all of them, and here is an update.
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