Physics

A technician working on the OPAL detector, one of the four particle detectors of the LEP collider. This photo was taken in 1989 and the LEP began running later that year. Analysis of the data continued long after the LEP was shut down in 2000. Credit: David Parker/Science Photo Library A lot of the science […]

The LHCb experiment in its underground cavern. Credit: CERN A new LHCb analysis confirms a previously observed tension with the Standard Model, but more data and improved theoretical calculations are needed to determine whether new physics is at play. The LHCb collaboration has released the results of its latest analysis of the rare decay of

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Whether space-time exists should be neither controversial nor even conceptually challenging, given the definitions of “space-time,” “events” and “instants.” The idea that space-time exists is no more viable than the outdated belief that the celestial sphere exists: both are observer-centered models that are powerful and convenient for describing the world, but

Credit: CC0 Public Domain For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein’s general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time. Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear—especially when it comes

Proton decay chain. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/cxvm-p412 Although the building blocks of life such as hydrogen and oxygen appear stable to us, many theories of physics predict that they are actually just tremendously long-lived, with the particles found in their nuclei slowly, but ultimately decaying. To investigate this idea, researchers have been

Parametrization of the path of the gravitino adopted in this work. Credit: Physical Review Research (2025). DOI: 10.1103/fm6h-7r78 Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics. Many theoretical proposals (axions, WIMPs) and 40 years of extensive experimental searches have failed to provide any explanation of the nature of dark matter. Several years

Lead muon detector developer Polad Shikhaliev looks on as JungHyun Bae, a Wigner Distinguished Staff Fellow at ORNL, looks inside a muon detector he envisioned during his doctoral studies. Credit: Sumner Brown Gibbs/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy In a collaboration showing the power of innovation and teamwork, physicists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s

Artistic rendering of quark–gluon plasma. Credit: CERN This summer, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) took a breath of fresh air. Normally filled with beams of protons, the 27-km ring was reconfigured to enable its first oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions. First results from the new data, recorded over a period of six days by the ALICE,

Credit: Pixabay from Pexels Tiny solid particles—like pollutants, cloud droplets and medicine powders—form highly concentrated clusters in turbulent environments like smokestacks, clouds and pharmaceutical mixers. What causes these extreme clusters—which make it more difficult to predict everything from the spread of wildfire smoke to finding the right combination of ingredients for more effective drugs—has puzzled

Two pionless charged-current electron-neutrino interactions from the MicroBooNE ecperiment. Left: An electron shower with no proton. Right: An electron shower and a proton track. Credit: MicroBooNE Collaboration A recent Physical Review Letters publication presents a thorough analysis of MicroBooNE detector data, investigating the anomalous surplus of neutrino-like events detected by the preceding MiniBooNE experiment. In