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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

Berkeley Band re-enacts the big bang

The world, by some accounts, was created in seven days. Not to try and top that, but a university band managed to re-enact the big bang in a period of less than an hour.

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

Stanford Guest House

Guest houses are common among particle physics labs, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is no exception. But in many ways, the Stanford Guest House, situated on the grounds of SLAC, is different.

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

A project worth its salt

The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.