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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. 

02/01/07

Evolution of a collider

As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.

02/01/07

CMS assembly

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is one of the two general purpose particle detectors being constructed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland.

02/01/07

Simulations

Simulations allow physicists to make predictions.

02/01/07

Engineering big upgrades

How do you renovate a delicate, irreplaceable detector? Very carefully. During the last four months of 2006, the BaBar collaboration at SLAC successfully replaced a prematurely aging muon identification system.

12/01/06

“Dirty bubble chamber”

Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe

12/01/06

Raising the flags

Security officers raise and lower 20 flags in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall every day. Each flag represents a country that researchers come from to work at the lab. "The problem is that there are twenty flag poles," says Fermilab's Roy Rubinstein.

12/01/06

The many lives of Fermi's magnet

If this magnet could talk, you'd hear some amazing stories. During its half-century career, this four-million-pound magnet contributed to experiments that changed our view of physics while serving some of the field's foremost experimenters, including Enrico Fermi.