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, …
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 American artist Peter Halley has taken over 5,000 square feet of the Schirn Kunsthalle exhibition hall in Frankfurt, turning its huge rotunda into a futuristic exploration of architecture and space that’s inspired in part by the LHC.
A tiny mammal has reportedly brought the world’s largest scientific experiment to a halt. The Large Hadron Collider suffered a power outage last night, after a luckless weasel decided to chew on a 66-kilovolt power cable.
The Large Hadron Collider is impressive for a great many reasons. But forget about all that cutting-edge science for a moment and instead marvel at the scale of the engineering behind the project.
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have seen the first traces of what they believe could be a new fundamental particle.
The Large Hadron Collider has been back online and pushing the limits of physics again for a few months now. But it’s about to enter a new phase, colliding lead ions at twice the energy that any collider has ever achieved in the past.
It’s normally just researchers that get to experiment at the LHC. But one physicist has decided to invite a series of bands to play around at the world’s largest science lab — and this is the result.
Bad news, citizens of Earth: those evil physicists at CERN are once again hellbent on vaporizing the Earth and ending the universe as we know it as the Large Hadron Collider ramps up to unprecedented energies. That’s according to Lonnie Robinson, intrepid correspondent/prophet of doom for The Daily Reporter in…
After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks.
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.
As of today, the Large Hadron Collider will run at full, record-breaking power levels, as scientists kick off a new set of experiments that will help us understand the secrets of particle physics.
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.
The electronic camera on a chip in your smartphone is the same style of technology used in the Large Hadron Collider. Now a group of astrophysicists wants to capitalize on the similarity to recruit citizen sciences to track the fallout from ultra high energy cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere.
The Tevatron collider—the world’s second most powerful particle accelerator—was shut down in 2011. Now, from beyond the grave, it’s revealing properties of the Higgs boson.
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.
