fundamental

Artist’s concept of gravitational waves propagating through space.New laser breakthrough to help increase understanding of <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>gravitational waves</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black…

Illustration of cloud-like ionized plasma in the ITER fusion reactor tokamak. Credit: ITERPhysicists at EPFL, within a large European collaboration, have revised one of the fundamental laws that has been foundational to <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>plasma</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of…

After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists announced Thursday that a fundamental particle – the W boson – has a significantly greater mass than theorized, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the Universe works.  Those foundations are grounded by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the Universe, and what forces govern them.The W boson governs what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental…