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05/16/19

Europe’s path forward

Physicists meet this week in Granada, Spain, to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics.

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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.

02/01/08

W boson

In August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratory CERN. On her arrival she told Director General Herwig Schopper that she wanted to be treated as a fellow scientist.

02/01/08

SLAC's rocky past

Forty members of the Society for Sedimentary Geology drove down Loop Road, passed through the Sector 30 gate, and arrived on the north side of the klystron gallery.

02/01/08

Notes from the underworld

They had braved Parisian catacombs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavernous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncertainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting television crew.

02/01/08

W boson

The W boson is a charged force-carrying particle that transmits the weak force.

02/01/08

Dating a saint

Two towns in Italy lay claim to relics from St. Francis of Assisi–pieces of clothing and an embroidered cushion from his deathbed.

02/01/08

Short cuts for newcomers at the LHC

When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis. It did not go well.

02/01/08

Biking the snow away

After seeing a documentary on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition, in which men ate shoe leather to survive in bone-chilling temperatures, David Peterson felt kind of silly about letting snow stop his bicycle ride to work.

02/01/08

From eye to sight

Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is–in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses.

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