Particle accelerators have a lot of important jobs, like looking for new stuff by slamming beams of old stuff together. But a new particle accelerator observation has managed to be important while doing almost precisely the opposite of what we’d expect. Physicists have found evidence for hard-to-detect stuff by, well, …
Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help…
Four British schoolboys had just been called from class. They were ten days away from their A-level exams, the ones that determine the direction the rest of their lives would take, but they’d been interrupted from their studies to discuss the deepest secrets of the universe—their work hunting for the magnetic monopole…
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND— Hiding in the suburbs behind trees and a meadow with furry brown donkeys is a warehouse with an elevator that only visits negative floors. Hundreds of feet down, hyper complex detectors inside an octagonal tube the color and size of a large barn whistle loudly and peer like cameras at protons, the…
Conceptually, particle physics experiments are surprisingly simple. Smash a shitload of particles together, and look at what comes out. The results will either confirm whatever the business-as-usual theory is, or, if there’s a really crystal clear deviation from that theory, they might prove some new hypothesis about…
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beneath Geneva, Switzerland isn’t just one, but a handful of experiments sprinkled along the length of the 17-mile-round ring. One of the biggest, the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS, is getting a major upgrade today, which CERN is comparing to an open-heart surgery.
The Large Hadron Collider sits underground, spanning over five miles across beneath the bucolic suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. This metal behemoth serves to try and understand the most basic building blocks of our universe. The question stands, then: if ghosts are real, shouldn’t the LHC have found them?
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine in the world, but it only took one adventurous weasel to shut it down in November of last year. The unfortunate fellow jumped over a substation fence and was hit by 18,000 volts of electricity. Now, its stuffed corpse is on display at the Rotterdam…
Well, shoot. It’s been confirmed that early hints of a possible exotic new particle at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have vanished. That disappointing news was announced this morning at a physics conference in Chicago.
Scientists working at CERN have found four new “tetraquark” particles comprised of the same four subatomic building blocks. These exotic particles don’t last very long, and they probably don’t play an important cosmological role, but the discovery reveals the surprising diversity of the tetraquark family.
Rumors are swirling again among physicists, but this time they’re not about gravitational waves. Instead, hopes are fading that two separate, but complementary, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider may have discovered a possible new particle.
Earlier this week, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider announced they’d found tantalizing traces of a possible new fundamental particle — perhaps a heavier cousin of the Higgs boson, or the elusive graviton, a quantum carrier of the force of gravity.
After two years of upgrades, the world’s largest particle accelerator is back in business. And it’s already bashing subatomic particles together at higher energies than ever before to probe the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe.
Late yesterday, CERN scientists made history by using the most powerful particle accelerator in the world to hurl beams of protons together at the record-breaking energy of 13 TeV (tera-electronvolts) — a full 5 TeV higher than the previous standard.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have just announced the detection of a rare particle decay “harder to find than the famous Higgs particle.” The strange B meson is certainly a lot less famous than the Higgs boson, but it also has an important role to play in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Particle physicist and musician Piotr Traczyk has taken data plots from the historic discovery of the Higgs boson and converted it into music that can be played by two guitars. Heavy metal guitars, to be more precise. The result is as nerdy as it is excellent.
It's been closed for renovations and upgrades since 2013, but on Sunday, the Large Hadron Collider powered on with no sign of complications, and successfully carried two proton beams, fired in opposite directions, around its 27km circumference.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most audacious physics experiment in human history. Now scientists are about to restart the giant particle collider for a new set of experiments. Last time, they did the almost-impossible and found the Higgs Boson. This time, they might find something even more exciting.
Symmetry is a dance and opera film that was directed by Ruben van Leer and was shot inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider. It looks pretty epic and totally intriguing with some scenes feeling a little bit like Interstellar. The film will premiere on March 15 in Amsterdam.
Everyone's favorite mega-machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is meant to help humans some of the most basic questions about the nature of our world. How it goes about this is—in a word—complex. But part of it involves a bit of good old-fashioned (kind of) photography.
