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Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25

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.

11/01/07

Scary Ben

It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.

11/01/07

Déjà blue

As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine­—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.

11/01/07

Jets

A jet forms when a quark or gluon is produced in a high-energy particle collision.

11/01/07

You have 3Hψi new messages

JoAnne Hewett’s most recent paper is a collaboration between physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

11/01/07

GEQ***T

When Tom Nash bought a new Porsche 911 Carrera 4, he wanted to give it some personal flair. So he applied for a custom license plate: GEQ8PIT.

11/01/07

Free for all

The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.

11/01/07

DUSEL mine tour

In March 2007, members of a US National Science Foundation panel went on a whirlwind bus tour of potential sites for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Here’'s an account of that trip by Peter Fisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

11/01/07

On the trail of cosmic bullets

Do the most energetic particles in the universe come from supermassive black holes? New results from the Pierre Auger Observatory make that case.