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.
In less than three years, scientists will start up the world's largest scientific instrument: The Large Hadron Collider. US scientists have built key components for the machine and its experiments, paving the way for their participation in a decade of discoveries.
Every winter, pine trees on the KEK campus in Tsukuba, Japan, get a treat. Komomaki (woven-straw blankets) are wrapped around the pines a few feet above the ground.
Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.
Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.
Physicists and scientists of other disciplines around the world have created countless research sites that remind me of the colossal dimensions of ancient temples, in one way; and, in another, of fragile, beautiful little altars where they orchestrate experiments, with research objects largely in