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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.

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.

02/01/07

Walking in the dark?

I have been attending hundreds of talks by particle physicists who look for a very specific experimental signature that is predicted by a very specific theory extending the Standard Model.

02/01/07

Dark matter rap

I first heard of dark matter at a Moriond Conference in 1987.

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.

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

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.

12/01/06

The human side of virtual collaboration

Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.

12/01/06

Gigantic pumpkin

Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.