The milestones of the year 2022 allowed the particle physics community to celebrate the achievements of the past ten years while looking forward to a new physics run at the LHC. CERN’s website saw a sevenfold increase in traffic, 75% of which was new visitors. Together, the broadcasting of the Scientific Symposium to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery and of the launch of Run 3 caused the hashtags #Higgs10 and #LHCRun3 to “trend” in Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. On social media, CERN was mentioned 727 100 times from January to August 2022, and 17 800 of those mentions made specific reference to either the restart, Run 3 or the anniversary. In total, news outlets from around the world produced 6900 articles about the anniversary and Run 3 for publications worldwide. The conversation also included events such as a new exhibition, four local film screenings that brought in almost 500 participants, articles for teachers and a scientific symposium that brought together 1150 remote participants and nearly 400 in-person attendees. These impressive figures are the fruit of a six-month-long conversation between CERN and its communities, from local to digital, centred around the milestones of the year and involving a legion of physicists, engineers, technicians and communication professionals. At its peak, the event garnered 75 700 viewers 59 600 comments were posted on social media during CERN’s two-hour livestream.
The world has changed in many ways over these past ten years, yet the universe’s mysteries and the LHC continue to excite and inspire: almost five million people (4.73M) connected live on CERN’s social media and through other broadcasting services to watch the engineers in charge of the LHC deliver collisions to the experiments for the first time in three years. Just the day before, CERN had celebrated the ten-year mark since the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the long-awaited Higgs boson. Roughly three months later, on 5 July 2022, the first collisions used for physics data taking took place at the record energy of 13.6 teraelectronvolts, marking the beginning of the LHC’s third physics run (Run 3). The Large Hadron Collider was switched back on earlier this year, after three years of upgrades and maintenance works.
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