This edition of the newsletter marks the end of the first half of 2020. Since a few months the whole world has been going through an unprecedented crisis, and so has CERN. We were forced to empty CERN of its personnel and to stay at home while the wave of the pandemic rolled over us. By mid-May we could begin the process of restarting the activities on the CERN sites. This restart is being done in a very careful, gradual and controlled way. The CERN management, as well as that of the EP department, always has your health as the highest of all priorities. With this gradual increase of personnel at CERN, both the employed members of the personnel as well as the users, we can ensure that the safety procedures, the health measures taken in offices and public buildings and the familiarisation of all of us with the new rules and measures can keep pace with the increasing density of colleagues at CERN. Please remain patient, and when called back to CERN I would like to ask you to follow meticulously the new health and safety rules. 

While CERN has been almost deserted in the past months, it did not mean that work stopped. The vast majority of you did continue to work from home. The articles in this edition of the newsletter reflect some of this continuing work. You may read about the already ongoing activities in the LHC experiments, as well as new results from LHC, ISOLDE and the CLOUD experiment. Take your time to read the very interesting interview of Andrei Linde in which he explains how the idea of inflation of the universe was developed and the relation of cosmology and particle physics. And, finally, the CERN Council has updated the European Strategy of Particle Physics in its recent online session. The related article summarises the main considerations and provides a link to the official document.

Enjoy reading these articles and I hope to see you very soon back at CERN!

Manfred Krammer

EP Department Head