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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.

Muons: Emblems of discovery

01/13/26

Once a surprise to physicists, these particles are useful tools inside and outside the realm of particle physics. 

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

W boson

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

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

Jennifer Ouellette: The Big Bang Theory

One of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!

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.