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 ...

For decades scientists have tried to find a way to measure the mass of the lightest matter particle known to exist. Three new approaches now have a chance to succeed. In 1980, Hamish Robertson was a ...

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 ...

For physicists trying to harness the power of electricity, no tool was more important than the vacuum tube. This lightbulb-like device controlled the flow of electricity and could amplify signals. In ...

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.

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 ...

Three physicists share their experiences learning and communicating physics in a foreign language: English. Rose Ferreira, an astronomer and popular-science communicator who goes by the name Rose DF, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Learn about the Standard Model of particle physics and how physicists use it to predict the (subatomic) future. In ancient times, Greeks interested in forecasting the future would voyage on the ...