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Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25

Sarah Charley

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together to solve the puzzle.

12/01/07

LHC cabling

It’s heavy, dusty, dirty work: Deep in the bowels of the LHC detectors, workers are rushing to connect a rat’s nest of cables.

An illustration depicting scale differences

12/01/07

Terascale

The Terascale is an energy region named for the tera, or million million, electronvolts of energy needed to access it. Physicists are standing at its threshold, poised to enter this uncharted territory of the subatomic world.

12/01/07

Life among the physics tribes

Meeting in CERN’s Restaurant 1, anthropologist Arpita Roy of the University of California, Berkeley is quick to declare that she will not be having any more coffee today. She has begun drinking multiple cups per day as she meets with CERN physicists to learn about their work.

12/01/07

Q&A: James Gillies

Hollywood directors, time travelers, journalists, school kids—CERN’s press office sees them all.

12/01/07

Spartan software

Every time Fermilab scientist Tom Schwarz starts up SpartyJet, he inwardly grimaces. The computer program works well. It does a fine job of finding and recording jets—sprays of subatomic particles that emerge from collisions involving protons.

12/01/07

Connecting with Africa

ATLAS, a particle physics experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, boasts 2000-plus members from 35 countries. But on a map showing where those members come from, one continent is almost mark-free: Africa.

12/01/07

The LHC by mail

Each year the European laboratory CERN welcomes tens of thousands of visitors. Now the lab can visit them back.

12/01/07

Penguins and particles

‘Tis the season for science at the bottom of the Earth. Researchers are flying to the South Pole from all over the globe to take advantage of the “ warm” summer months, when temperatures average minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit.

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