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
The Higgs boson reached overnight fame in 2012 when it was finally discovered in a jumble of other particles generated at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery was monumental because the ...
General Physics
Oct 7, 2020
6
1134
At the 40th ICHEP conference, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced new results which show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute ...
Quantum Physics
Aug 4, 2020
0
858
The best-known particle in the lepton family is the electron, a key building block of matter and central to our understanding of electricity. But the electron is not an only child. It has two heavier siblings, the muon and ...
General Physics
Jul 30, 2020
2
115
Researchers have for the first time measured a fundamental property of magnets called magnon polarization—and in the process, are making progress towards building low-energy devices.
Quantum Physics
Jul 28, 2020
0
399
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
164
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
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
544
