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 ...

Most astronomers trek to the mountaintops to study the stars, but a group of physicists are seeking the secrets of the cosmos with a detector at the bottom of the ocean. Deep underwater, far off the ...

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 ...

A forthcoming upgrade to the IceCube detector will provide deeper insights into the elusive particles. Underneath the vast, frozen landscape of the South Pole lies IceCube, a gigantic observatory ...

Take an interactive animated journey through the particle physics alphabet. Accelerators and black holes and cryostats, oh my! We know particle physics can seem daunting at times, but everything’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen? The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert ...

Rubin Observatory will bring new capabilities to the studies of dark matter and dark energy. In just a few years, scientists at Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will launch the Legacy Survey of ...

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 exploring a variety of ways to make quantum bits. We may not need to settle on a single one. The goal of building a quantum computer is to harness the quirks of quantum physics to solve ...