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.
The Gargamelle collaboration at the European laboratory CERN began operating its bubble chamber in the early 1970s, shooting neutrinos through 12,000 liters of Freon, a heavy liquid.
Imagine a house-sized acrylic fishbowl inside a giant, shiny, disco-ball-like sphere, suspended in a cavern as tall as a 10-story building. Now imagine climbing around inside that pitch-dark fishbowl with a squeegee and a flashlight.
When I assumed the position of director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), my smart-mouthed friends joked that I became the Director of the Universe.
Fermilab is cooking up a hot technology—and the serving is ultracold. The laboratory is stepping up efforts to develop and test superconducting radio-frequency cavities, a key technology for the next generation of particle accelerators and the future of particle physics.
The eyes of the world were on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on September 10, 2008. On that day, dubbed "Big Bang Day" by the BBC, the first beams of subatomic particles zoomed around the 17-mile-long, super-cooled particle accelerator.
Alberto sits down at a computer and brings up a clickable map of CERN. But rather than dry text, he is greeted with bright, musical animation, a pinball game, a quiz show, rocket ships, evil slugs, and music videos.