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ALICE with one door open

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.

Image of PentaquarkChart
09/01/06

The rise and fall of the pentaquark

Although initial results were encouraging, physicists searching for an exotic five-quark particle now think it probably doesn't exist. The debate over the pentaquark search shows how science moves forward.

09/01/06

Antarctica, California

When researchers at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center realized their distance from Antarctica was a scientific inconvenience, they set about crafting an icy world of their own in Menlo Park, California.

09/01/06

Packing it in

Globe-traveling physicists put some of their best thinking into strategies for their bags–all carry-ons, of course.

09/01/06

Secret of the hidden ledger

When exploring the mysteries of the universe, don't neglect the floorboards. Last December at Fermilab, repairs to the ceiling over the kitchen in the Aspen East users' center, targeting a joist that had distorted the floor of the dorm room above, produced some startling debris.

09/01/06

Cartoons by design

As a mechanical designer, Catherine Carr's first big undertaking at SLAC was a vacuum transporter system that let operators install electron cathodes, under vacuum, into the injector gun of the Stanford Linear Collider.

09/01/06

Robert Straight: Toroids and plaids

Pick a number: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113 …and so on and on… and on…and on…. Get the picture?

09/01/06

Zoo events

When physicists at Fermilab smash particles together, most of what comes out of the collisions is well understood. But every once in awhile strange things appear in the data—incidents popularly known as zoo events.

09/01/06

The pentaquark rush

In 2003, results published by three experimental collaborations initiated a flood of papers about a class of particles known as pentaquarks.

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