large hadron collider

Pondering the scale of the cosmos can feel as if you’re peering over the edge of the brink; it can be daunting enough to make you want to flee to the comforts of working, commuting, and other quotidian endeavors. But in Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges From the Cosmic Ocean, theoretical physicist and science communicator Matt Strassler doesn’t flinch in the face of the universe.What Should Fans Take Away from Imaginary?Published this week, Strassler’s book expands on the ideas he’s explored for years…

February 7, 20244 min readA feasibility study on CERN’s Future Circular Collider identifies where and how the machine could be built—but its construction is far from assuredBy Elizabeth Gibney, Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazineThe proposed Future Circular Collider, or FCC (large circle, dashed outline), would be built close to its predecessor at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider (small circle). Europe is pushing forwards with plans to build a 91-kilometre-long, 15-billion-swiss-franc (US$17-billion) supercollider…

Illustration of two types of long-lived particles decaying into a pair of muons, showing how the signals of the muons can be traced back to the long-lived particle decay point using data from the tracker and muon detectors. Credit: CMS/CERN This search for exotic long-lived particles looks at the possibility of “dark photon” production, which would occur when a Higgs boson decays into muons displaced in the detector.The CMS experiment has presented its first search for new physics using data from Run 3 of the Large Hadron…

Scientists working on CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment have published the latest data in their search for a long-lived exotic particle known as the dark photon.Let’s Eat a Chocolate Xbox ControllerDark photons (also called hidden photons) differ from regular photons—particles of light—in that they are thought to have mass, making them a prime candidate to explain dark matter. Dark matter is the catchall term to describe seemingly invisible stuff in space that has only been observed via its gravitational…

WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. physicists have a bold new plan to “explore the quantum universe,” from the smallest bits of matter to the broadest reaches of the cosmos.On December 7 the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), a committee of experts that convenes roughly once a decade, debuted its draft report, which charts a course for U.S. particle physics across the next two decades. “What we are really after is: ‘How does the universe work?’” says Hitoshi Murayama, chair of P5 and a theorist at the University of…

Researchers at CERN’s ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider have introduced a novel approach to search for Dark Matter through semi-visible jets, marking a significant paradigm shift in the field. Their work provides new directions and stringent upper bounds in the ongoing quest to understand dark matter.Researchers investigate whether dark matter particles actually are produced inside a jet of standard model particles.The existence of dark matter is a long-standing puzzle in our universe. Dark matter makes up…

A team of researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have measured the mass of the W boson and found it to be in line with the Standard Model of particle physics, the overarching theory that describes the four fundamental forces and the characteristics of the smallest units of matter.What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | TechmodoThe team’s finding counters a precise measurement taken last year by a collaboration of hundreds of scientists atthe CDF Collaboration, who were happily surprised to find that the…

Our universe started with a bang that blasted everything into existence. But what happened next is a mystery. Scientists think that before atoms formed—or even the protons and neutrons they’re made of—there was probably a hot, soupy mix of two elementary particles called quarks and gluons, churning through space as a plasma. And because no one was around to observe the first moments of the cosmos, a coalition of researchers is trying to re-run history.Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National…

In the popular imagination, black holes are voracious monstrosities gulping down anything in their vicinity. That is why there are occasional worries that physicists might accidentally or intentionally create one, perhaps inside a particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Would such a dark behemoth swallow up Earth itself? Not quite. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn’t pose a huge threat. Real-world black holes are…

SEATTLE—After a year of seemingly endless Zoom meetings, Slack chats and e-mails, nearly 800 particle physicists descended on the University of Washington to share their scientific dreams and nightmares in person. For 10 days at the end of July, whether masked inside conference rooms or sipping coffee beneath unusually sunny Seattle skies, they attempted to build a unified vision of their field’s future. The story of 20th century particle physics is chronicled in the pantheon of elementary particles dubbed the Standard…