Dear Colleagues, Members of the EP Department and CERN Users,

Welcome to the 4th and last edition of the EP Newsletter this year. 2016 is almost over, and it went very fast. It has been an extremely successful year for CERN. The LHC experiments have collected more data they have ever dreamed of when starting Run 2 and the IT department had even to stock up further tapes to store the data flood. But it was not only a flood of data, these collisions were collected with excellently performing experiments and will lead the LHC into the precision measurement era. The non-LHC experiments at CERN did very well too. Just to mention a few, NA62 had a full year of running with the completed detector, the CLOUD experiment ran with an improved set up and instrumentations, and the experiments at the AD continued their progress towards precision measurements of antiprotons and antihydrogen. The ELENA ring, which will improve the performance of the AD experiments by orders of magnitude is completed and commissioning has started and HIE-ISOLDE successfully put in operation the first stage of the post-acceleration of isotopes.

We will soon close the laboratory for the Xmas break. Please respect this closure, relax with your family and if you cannot do without physics read this newsletter from home. In it you will find again a large variety of different articles reflecting the diversity of the EP department.

Finally, I would like to take this occasion to thank Panos Charitos for following the activities in our department and the many articles he has provided for the EP newsletters this year.

Happy Holidays and enjoy the Xmas break!

Manfred Krammer

EP Department Head