In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together ...

The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

Perplexed by gravity? Don’t let it get you down. Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a ...

For decades scientists have tried to find a way to measure the mass of the lightest matter particle known to exist. Three new approaches now have a chance to succeed. In 1980, Hamish Robertson was a ...

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

For more than two decades, amateur photographer Dale Carter has documented the physicists who come to the Black Hills for their research. Photography is sometimes thought of as one part skill and one ...

Building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope also means solving extraordinary technological challenges. In a brightly lit clean room at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator ...

Every six months on the spring and autumn equinoxes, a serpent slithers down the side of the El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, Mexico. Well, it’s not a real serpent—it’s an optical illusion caused ...

The answer has to do with dark matter’s role in shaping the cosmos. Half a century after Vera Rubin and Kent Ford confirmed that a form of invisible matter—now called dark matter—is required to ...