https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Dark matter, a type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, is predicted to account for most of the matter in the universe. As it eludes common experimental techniques for studying ordinary matter, understanding the nature and composition of dark matter has so far proved very challenging. One hypothesis is that it is made up of hypothetical particles known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axions. These are theoretical elementary particles that would interact very weakly with ordinary matter and are predicted to be extremely light, highly stable and electrically neutral. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-piezoelectric-materials-enable-approach-axions.html General Physics Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:00:01 EDT news693760593 Baryons, composite particles made up of three quarks bound together via the so-called strong force, make up the most visible matter and have thus been the focus of numerous physics studies. Studying the rare processes via which unstable baryons decay into other particles could potentially contribute to the discovery of new physics that is not explained by the Standard Model of particle physics. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-lhcb-collaboration-ultra-rare-baryon.html General Physics Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:10:33 EDT news674817018 The first-known observations of matter–antimatter asymmetry in a decaying composite subatomic particle that belongs to the baryon class are reported from the LHCb experiment located at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This effect, known as charge–parity (CP) violation, has been theoretically predicted, but hitherto escaped observation in baryons. The experimental verification of this asymmetry violation in baryons, published in Nature this week, is important as baryons make up most of the matter in the observable universe. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-antimatter-mismatch-subatomic-particles-clue.html General Physics Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:23:50 EDT news671891026 On March 24, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference taking place in La Thuile, Italy, the LHCb collaboration at CERN reported a new milestone in our understanding of the subtle yet profound differences between matter and antimatter. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-piece-matterantimatter-puzzle-fundamental-asymmetry.html General Physics Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:13:04 EDT news662202781 In the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But fast forward 13.8 billion years to the present day, and the universe is made almost entirely of matter, so something must have happened to create this imbalance. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-lhcb-pieces-matterantimatter-puzzle-baryon.html General Physics Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:30:13 EST news653574601 The Anthropic Principle—stating that the universe we live in is fine-tuned to host life—was first proposed by Brandon Carter in 1973. Since then, it has sparked significant debate. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-universe-anthropic-principle.html Astronomy Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:01 EST news652700461 In a major step for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), scientists have detected the first neutrinos using a DUNE prototype particle detector at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). https://phys.org/news/2024-08-scientists-neutrinos-prototype-detector.html General Physics Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:49:05 EDT news642696541 The international NOvA collaboration presented new results at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on June 17. The collaboration doubled their neutrino data since their previous release four years ago, including adding a new low-energy sample of electron neutrinos. https://phys.org/news/2024-06-nova-results-mystery-neutrinos.html General Physics Fri, 28 Jun 2024 07:55:54 EDT news638780149 Once a particle of matter, always a particle of matter. Or not. Thanks to a quirk of quantum physics, four known particles made up of two different quarks—such as the electrically neutral D meson composed of a charm quark and an up antiquark—can spontaneously oscillate into their antimatter partners and vice versa. https://phys.org/news/2024-04-asymmetry-antimatter.html General Physics Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:03:02 EDT news632145781 New research in Physical Review Letters (PRL) has proposed a novel method to detect light dark matter candidates using laser interferometry to measure the oscillatory electric fields generated by these candidates. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-galileo-scientists-method-dark.html Astronomy Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:40:02 EDT news629714231 Scientists are getting a more detailed look than ever before at the electrons they use in precision experiments. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-laser-focused-electrons-shatters-world.html General Physics Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:02:31 EST news628178545 Scientists from a number of leading research institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, used the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope to observe 68 of SpaceX's satellites. The authors conclude that they detected "unintended electromagnetic radiation" emanating from onboard electronics. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-radio-unintended-electromagnetic-emanating-large.html Astronomy Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:23:03 EDT news607782181 Since axions were first predicted by theory nearly half a century ago, researchers have hunted for proof of the elusive particle, which may exist outside the visible universe, in the dark sector. But how does one find particles that can't be seen? https://phys.org/news/2023-06-elusive-axion-particles-methods-exploring.html General Physics Wed, 07 Jun 2023 13:39:01 EDT news605363936 Where did all the antimatter go? After the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. Why we live in a universe of matter, with very little antimatter, remains a mystery. The excess of matter could be explained by the violation of charge-parity (CP) symmetry, which essentially means that certain processes that involve particles behave differently to those that involve their antiparticles. https://phys.org/news/2023-04-probing-fundamental-symmetries-nature-higgs.html General Physics Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:09:42 EDT news601301379 A South Korean research team at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research (CAPP) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) recently announced the most advanced experimental setup to search for axions. The group has successfully taken its first step toward the search for Dine-Fischler-Srednicki-Zhitnitsky (DFSZ) axion dark matter originating from the Grand Unification Theory (GUT). Not only that, the IBS-CAPP experimental setup allows for far greater search speed compared to any other axion search experiments in the world. https://phys.org/news/2023-02-south-korea-debuts-dfsz-axion.html General Physics Mon, 20 Feb 2023 16:00:17 EST news596131214 The Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII) Collaboration has reported a new method for probing differences between matter and antimatter with extreme sensitivity. Results were published in Nature on June 2. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-probing-conjugation-parity-symmetry-entangled.html Quantum Physics Thu, 02 Jun 2022 09:17:48 EDT news573380266 The final piece of an all-new detector has completed the first leg of its journey towards unlocking some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2022-05-device-ultimate-existential.html General Physics Mon, 02 May 2022 10:00:01 EDT news570702197 Unique among its peers is the top quark—a fascinating particle that the scientific community has been studying in detail since the 90s. Its large mass makes it the only quark to decay before forming bound states (a process known as hadronisation) and gives it the strongest coupling to the Higgs boson. Theorists predict it may also interact strongly with new particles—if it does, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the ideal place to find out as it is a "top-quark factory." https://phys.org/news/2021-06-atlas-quark-polarization.html General Physics Wed, 23 Jun 2021 15:43:28 EDT news543681805 Physicists have proved that a subatomic particle can switch into its antiparticle alter-ego and back again, in a new discovery revealed today. https://phys.org/news/2021-06-subatomic-particle-antiparticle.html General Physics Tue, 08 Jun 2021 09:19:53 EDT news542362786 Stars, galaxies, and everything in the universe, including our own bodies, are comprised of so-called regular matter. Regular matter includes atoms and molecules, which are made up of tiny particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. These particles dominate our universe, vastly outnumbering their lesser-known counterparts: antimatter particles. First experimentally discovered in 1932 by the late Nobel laureate and longtime Caltech professor Carl Anderson, antimatter particles have the opposite charges to their matter counterparts. The antimatter particle to the negatively charged electron, for example, is the positively charged positron. https://phys.org/news/2021-03-radioactive-molecules-mystery-antimatter.html General Physics Mon, 29 Mar 2021 09:01:39 EDT news536227271 Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists in the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work characterizing its properties and hunting down the diverse ways in which this ephemeral particle can decay. From the copious but experimentally challenging decay to b-quarks, to the exquisitely rare but low-background decay into four leptons, each offers a different avenue to study the properties of this new particle. Now, ATLAS has found first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying to two leptons (either an electron or a muon pair with opposite charge) and a photon. Known as "Dalitz decay," this is one of the rarest Higgs boson decays yet seen at the LHC. https://phys.org/news/2021-02-atlas-evidence-rare-higgs-boson.html General Physics Tue, 09 Feb 2021 08:40:08 EST news532082405 In the 1970s, physicists uncovered a problem with the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that describes three of the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions; the fourth is gravity). They found that, while the theory predicts that a symmetry between particles and forces in our Universe and a mirror version should be broken, the experiments say otherwise. This mismatch between theory and observations is dubbed 'the Strong CP problem'—CP stands for Charge+Parity. What is the CP problem, and why has it puzzled scientists for almost half a century? https://phys.org/news/2020-12-dark-neutron-stars-radio-telescopes.html General Physics Mon, 21 Dec 2020 12:45:11 EST news527777103 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 Higgs boson – remained undetected for almost 50 years. https://phys.org/news/2020-11-refining-picture-higgs-boson.html General Physics Fri, 20 Nov 2020 10:31:59 EST news525090715 An international collaboration of theoretical physicists—including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC)—has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. The collaboration, known as RBC-UKQCD, also includes scientists from CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Edinburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Regensburg, and the University of Southampton. They describe their result in a paper to be published in the journal Physical Review D and has been highlighted as an "editor's suggestion." https://phys.org/news/2020-09-refines-comparison-antimatter.html General Physics Thu, 17 Sep 2020 14:09:12 EDT news519570532 When a particle is transformed into its antiparticle and its spatial coordinates inverted, the laws of physics are required to stay the same—or so we thought. This symmetry—known as CP symmetry (charge conjugation and parity symmetry) – was considered to be exact until 1964, when a study of the kaon particle system led to the discovery of CP violation. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-sources-matterantimatter-symmetry-higgs-boson.html General Physics Tue, 02 Jun 2020 10:10:02 EDT news510310899 The T2K Collaboration has published new results showing the strongest constraint yet on the parameter that governs the breaking of the symmetry between matter and antimatter in neutrino oscillations. Using beams of muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos, T2K has studied how these particles and antiparticles transition into electron neutrinos and electron antineutrinos, respectively. The parameter governing the matter/antimatter symmetry breaking in neutrino oscillation, called δcp phase, can take a value from -180º to 180º. For the first time, T2K has disfavored almost half of the possible values at the 99.7% (3σ) confidence level, and is starting to reveal a basic property of neutrinos that has not been measured until now. This is an important step on the way to knowing whether or not neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently. These results, using data collected through 2018, have been published in the multidisciplinary scientific journal, Nature on April 16. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-t2k-results-restrict.html General Physics Wed, 15 Apr 2020 11:00:08 EDT news506149466 New results from precision particle detectors at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) offer a fresh glimpse of the particle interactions that take place in the cores of neutron stars and give nuclear physicists a new way to search for violations of fundamental symmetries in the universe. The results, just published in Nature Physics, could only be obtained at a powerful ion collider such as RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. https://phys.org/news/2020-03-strange-glimpse-neutron-stars-symmetry.html General Physics Mon, 09 Mar 2020 12:00:13 EDT news502967662 ADMX, with its world-leading sensitivity, has ruled out axions of a certain mass range as dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-admx-world-constraint-dark-axions.html General Physics Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:57:17 EST news493286231 What is dark matter made of? It's one of the most perplexing questions of modern astronomy. We know that dark matter is out there, since we can see its obvious gravitational influence on everything from galaxies to the evolution of the entire universe, but we don't know what it is. Our best guess is that it's some sort of weird new particle that doesn't like to talk to normal matter very often (otherwise, we would have seen it by now). One possibility is that it's an exotic hypothetical kind of particle known as an axion, and a team of astronomers are using none other than black holes to try to get a glimpse into this strange new cosmic critter. https://phys.org/news/2019-05-dark-axions-black-holes-reveal.html Astronomy Mon, 20 May 2019 09:19:34 EDT news477562762 Since March 25, 2019, the Belle II detector instrument in Japan has been measuring collisions of particles generated in the SuperKEKB accelerator. The new duo produces more than 50 times the number of collisions compared to its predecessor. The huge increase in data means that there is now a greater chance of explaining the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. https://phys.org/news/2019-03-anti-matter-successful-belle-ii.html General Physics Tue, 26 Mar 2019 07:09:25 EDT news472802959