Since the 1930s, scientists have been using particle accelerators to gain insights into the structure of matter and the laws of physics that govern our world. These accelerators are some of the most powerful experimental ...
Even if you weren't a physics major, you've probably heard something about the Higgs boson.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN usually collides protons together. It is these proton–proton collisions that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But the world's biggest accelerator was also designed ...
Since the very beginning of quantum physics, a hundred years ago, it has been known that all particles in the universe fall into two categories: fermions and bosons. For instance, the protons found in atomic nuclei are fermions, ...
The Standard Model, the most exhaustive existing theory outlining fundamental particle interactions, predicts the existence of what are known as triboson interactions. These interactions are processes in which three-gauge ...
Extremely light and weakly interacting particles may play a crucial role in cosmology and in the ongoing search for dark matter. Unfortunately, however, these particles have so far proved very difficult to detect using existing ...
To explain the masses of electroweak bosons—the W and Z bosons—theorists in the 1960s postulated a mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. While this mathematical formalism is relatively simple, its cornerstone—the ...
When you cool down liquid water, it crystallizes into ice. Consider a bucket filled with water, for example. When the water is liquid, the water molecules can be anywhere inside the bucket. In this sense, every point inside ...
Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are on the hunt for physics phenomena beyond the standard model. Some theories predict an as-yet undiscovered particle could be found in the form of a new resonance (a narrow ...
Despite its decades of predictive success, there are important phenomena left unexplained by the Standard Model of particle physics. Additional theories must exist that can fully describe the universe, even though definitive ...
