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
Two decades ago, an experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory pinpointed a mysterious mismatch between established particle physics theory and actual lab measurements. When researchers ...
General Physics
May 5, 2020
8
480
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the electromagnetic fields of Lorentz-contracted lead nuclei in heavy-ion collisions act as intense sources of high-energy photons, or particles of light. This environment allows ...
General Physics
Nov 27, 2019
0
47
New findings from University of Kansas experimental nuclear physicists Daniel Tapia Takaki and Aleksandr (Sasha) Bylinkin were just published in the European Physical Journal C. The paper centers on work at the Compact Muon ...
General Physics
Sep 10, 2019
12
1519
Does the Higgs boson follow all of the rules set by the Standard Model? Since discovering the particle in 2012, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have been hard at work studying the behaviour of the Higgs boson. Any unexpected ...
General Physics
Aug 6, 2019
1
273
A team of researchers from several institutions in India and Japan has found that it is possible to use a muon detector to measure electric potential in thunderstorms. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review ...
Dark matter, which is thought to account for nearly a quarter of matter in the universe (but has yet to be observed), has perplexed physicists for decades. They're constantly looking for something surprising to show up in ...
General Physics
Jan 30, 2019
18
3130
A muon is an unstable subatomic particle similar to an electron but with much greater mass. The lifetime of a muon is only a couple of microseconds, but this is long compared with the lifetimes of many unstable subatomic ...
General Physics
Sep 26, 2018
0
182
