Once a surprise to physicists, these particles are useful tools inside and outside the realm of particle physics.

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 ...

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 ...

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 Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be named for an influential astronomer who left the field better than she found it. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics ...

Over time, particle physics and astrophysics and computing have built upon one another’s successes. That coevolution continues today. In the mid-twentieth century, particle physicists were peering ...

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 ...

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

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 ...

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 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.

Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning—but many researchers are not giving up on it yet. The Standard Model of particle physics is ...