Collider luminosity is the key to particle physics discoveries. Fermilab and labs around the world have spared no effort in increasing their collider luminosities.
Hosting the "Late Show with Leon," Nobel laureate Leon Lederman shared with high school students his top fourteen ways to know you have won the Nobel Prize:
Unveiling the three-dimensional structure of proteins thrills scientists. While the potential for understanding the folding and function of enzymes is truly exciting by itself, exploring macromolecule structures also satisfies a more fundamental urge: to see the invisible.
In high-energy collisions, luminosity, or beam brightness, isn't the only thing to consider; low background noise at the detectors is also important. When wayward particles bounce around inside detectors, they can mimic real collisions, muddy results, and even damage parts of the collider.
After the discovery of a new elementary particle 10 years ago by Fermilab's CDF and DZero detector collaborations, a group from DZero threw a party. Between bottles of bubbly celebrating the top quark's detection, a contest of brains was in full-swing.
Stepping onto the site of a physics laboratory, you might expect to see enormous accelerators, ultra-powerful supercomputers, or scientists in lab coats racing between experiments. At one lab, however, what you will actually see are goats.
Nature provides three kinds of neutrinos. In the last ten years, physicists have gathered increasingly strong evidence for neutrino oscillations, the transformation of one kind of neutrino into another one.
