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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

Entering Higgs habitat

A powerful new collider will allow scientists to explore the territory where the long-sought Higgs particle—maybe even a whole family of them—resides.

Simulation showing a spray of particles created in a particle collision

12/01/07

Protecting the LHC from itself

Scientists at CERN have crafted the world’s most sophisticated machine protection system to save the LHC from itself.

12/01/07

Computers take on more than aliens

They started out scanning the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI@ home. They’ve plotted chess moves, battled malaria, and folded proteins, all from their home computers. Now, volunteers are tackling particle physics with LHC@home.

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.

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