Particle physics

Each time physicists discover a new particle, the Standard Model gets one step closer to becoming a Super Model. Key pointsThe Standard Model fits the quantum world perfectly, but it can't explain gravity, dark matter, or dark…

A four-muon candidate event in the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The muon/anti-muon... tracks are highlighted in red because long-lived muons travel farther than any other unstable particle.…

Neutrinos are among the most mysterious particles that exist. They are extremely difficult to detect because they tend to avoid other particles, but we know that they are expelled by supernovae, that one hundred trillion pass through our…

Working together, particle physicists from the United States and around the world have made exciting progress this year in our understanding of the universe at the smallest and largest scales. The LIGO…

Particle physics is amazing - an impressive combination of ambitious research and technical skill. Theorists have constructed a picture of our universe on the smallest scale, and experimentalists have devised the most ambitious experiments…

With tens of thousands of particle physicists working around the world today, the biggest challenge a researcher can have is keeping up with what others are doing. The articles they write, the collaborations…

Kristin Wiig will play badass particle physicist Erin Gilbert in the new ghost hunters, coming to theaters in July. In the official trailer, which was released on Thursday, fellow ectoplasm blaster Abby Yates, played by Melissa McCarthy,…

Physicists around the world (myself included) are hoping that this week will usher in a new era of discovery. And not, as some fear, the end of particle physics as we know it. After 27 months of shutdown and return to service, the…

The Standard Model of particle physics, which describes every particle we know of and how they interact, received a lot of credit when the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. Now measurements of a rare particle physics decay particles…

This week marks the end of a multi-step community planning process that will shape the coming decades of particle physics in the United States. On Thursday, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, will present its report —…

iron man 2the second installment of Iron Man film franchise, finds hero Tony Stark in a pickle: The "arc reactor" in Stark's chest (which generates magnetic fields to stop the movement of shrapnel through his body) is powered by palladium,…

As emerging players shake up old ambitions, Nigel Lockyer calls for the next generation of particle physics projects to be coordinated on a global scale.…

The same particle physics technology used to understand the universe is also used to improve health and medicine. Accelerators and detectors play an important role in the diagnosis of diseases, the reduction of tumors and the sterilization…

Saturday begins a new stage in the process that will set the priorities for US particle physics research for the next decade. The federal government's Particle Physics Research Advisory Group has appointed a group, called the Particle…

"Finally here!" With this unusual but understandable exuberance, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that it has awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs. Nearly half a century ago,…

At a major particle physics planning meeting this summer, a few dozen physicists volunteered to speak on camera about why they do what they do. We at symmetry chose our top five explanations and asked you to vote for your favorite. The…

Today, more than 600 particle physicists from nearly 100 universities and laboratories gathered at the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. Over the next nine days, this diverse group of experts, who study the most…

Layers Using particle accelerators, chemists were able to see the detailed wet structure of the superabsorbent polymer material used in the diapers for the first time. This allowed them to tweak and improve the formula of superabsorbent…

In particle physics, advanced computing is a way of life. Studying the universe on the smallest scale requires some of the largest datasets in the world, and particle physicists often have to create their own solutions to computational…

Image from the Beacons of Discovery report, by Reidar Hahn. This week, an international organization released its vision for the future of particle physics around the world. The International Committee for Future Accelerators has posted…