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 ...
General Physics
Nov 20, 2020
0
87
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 ...
General Physics
Nov 3, 2020
2
338
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 ...
General Physics
Oct 15, 2020
0
22
The nature of dark matter remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of fundamental physics. Unexplained by the Standard Model, dark matter has led scientists to probe new physics models to understand its existence. Many such ...
General Physics
Aug 13, 2020
3
245
The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has announced strong evidence of the production of four top quarks. This rare Standard Model process is expected to occur only once for every 70 thousand pairs of top quarks created at the ...
General Physics
Jun 23, 2020
0
163
Light-by-light scattering is a rare phenomenon in which two photons—particles of light—interact, producing another pair of photons. Direct observation of this process at high energy had proven elusive for decades, until ...
General Physics
Jun 19, 2020
0
44
The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN is exploring novel ways to search for new phenomena. Alongside an extensive research program often inspired by specific theoretical models—ranging from quantum black holes to supersymmetry—physicists ...
General Physics
Jun 17, 2020
0
78
Visible matter—everything from pollen to stars and galaxies—accounts for roughly 15% of the total mass of the universe. The remaining 85% is made of something entirely different from things we can touch and see: dark ...
General Physics
Jun 15, 2020
15
616
The Higgs boson was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 through its decays into pairs of photons, W bosons and Z bosons. Since then, physicists at these experiments ...
General Physics
Jun 12, 2020
0
542
A hallmark of the strong force at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the dramatic production of collimated jets of particles when quarks and gluons scatter at high energies. Particle physicists have studied jets for decades ...
General Physics
Jun 8, 2020
3
159
