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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nearly 75 years after the puzzling first detection of the kaon, scientists are still looking to the particle for hints of physics beyond their current understanding. All Clifford Charles Butler and ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

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 ...

If two protons collide at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, do they make a sound? What is it like inside the LHC? Symmetry tackles some unconventional questions about the world’s highest energy ...

Let yourself be pulled into the weird world of black holes. Imagine, somewhere in the galaxy, the corpse of a star so dense that it punctures the fabric of space and time. So dense that it devours any ...

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 ...