Photons, for centuries both a puzzle and a tool, continue to help scientists illuminate nature at the smallest and largest ...

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 ...

Matter and antimatter behave differently. Scientists hope that investigating how might someday explain why we exist. One of the great puzzles for scientists is why there is more matter than antimatter ...

The Planck scale sets the universe’s minimum limit, beyond which the laws of physics break. In the late 1890s, physicist Max Planck proposed a set of units to simplify the expression of physics laws.

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 ...

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 ...

Not only are we made of fundamental particles, we also produce them and are constantly bombarded by them throughout the day. Fourteen billion years ago, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe ...

A possible explanation for the lightness of neutrinos could help answer some big questions about the universe. Mass is a fundamental property of matter, but there’s still a lot about it we don’t ...

The LHCb experiment at CERN has revealed a fundamental asymmetry in the behavior of particles called baryons. “The reason why it took longer to observe CP violation in baryons than in mesons is down ...

The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms, and all those atoms are made of the same three things: electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are very similar particles in most respects.

The average banana produces a particle of antimatter roughly once every 75 minutes. US-based scientists and students working on research and experiments with the Large Hadron Collider contribute to a ...