Once a surprise to physicists, these particles are useful tools inside and outside the realm of particle physics. Every minute, countless muons rain down from space, passing through ...

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 ...

A team of young scientists paused their new physics searches to develop an innovative machine-learning tool, which is now helping them narrow in on a rare and messy decay of the Higgs boson. Physicist ...

Scientists on the ATLAS experiment explored the polarization of W bosons to test the Higgs mechanism and gain a deeper understanding of the first moments after the Big Bang. After the Big Bang, the ...

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate. In 1995, Alexander Grohsjean cut out a story from the local German ...

Documenting the work of building the world’s largest neutrino experiment presents photographers with a unique set of challenges. Discussing her decades-spanning career, photographer Annie Leibovitz ...

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.

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two distinct fundamental forces. That wasn’t always the case. How many fundamental forces are there in our universe? For particle physicists, answering ...

Symmetry is back with more physics-themed Halloween costumes. Nine years ago, Symmetry shared a list of physics-themed Halloween costumes for the spooky holiday. You have, no doubt, judiciously ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

Scientists are championing a relatively new technique as a method to understand the structure of the early universe in three dimensions. With enough time and magnifying power, a telescope can gather ...

Particle physicists are building innovative machine-learning algorithms to enhance Monte Carlo simulations with the power of AI. Originally developed nearly a century ago by physicists studying ...