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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.

01/01/06

PANIC trouble

When physicists organized the first Particles and Nuclei International Conference in 1963, nobody thought that the acronym PANIC could cause trouble in getting the word out about the meeting. That was before the now-common use of email.

11/01/05

Inventing the web

The idea for the World Wide Web first appeared in a memo dubbed “vague but exciting.”

11/01/05

Numbers: Pierre Auger Observatory

In November, the Pierre Auger Observatory outside Malargüe, Argentina, celebrates its scientific launch. The observatory will record high-energy cosmic-ray showers with ground-based water tank detectors and air-shower cameras.

11/01/05

Meet the Grid

Today's cutting-edge scientific projects are larger, more complex, and more expensive than ever. Grid computing provides the resources that allow researchers to share knowledge, data, and computer processing power across boundaries.

11/01/05

Networks of the past

In today's particle physics experiments, it takes a fraction of a second for data recorded by detectors to be transferred to a data storage facility. Soon thereafter, collaboration members from around the world have access to the data via the Internet.

11/01/05

Computing the quarks

A piece of steel may look cold and lifeless. But like any other piece of matter, it is bursting with activity deep inside. Electrons whiz around inside atoms, and a sea of never-resting quarks and gluons populates the nucleons that make up the atomic core.

11/01/05

Doctor Atomic: A manhattan project opera

Particle physics has been getting its due in the theater world with the recent plays Copenhagen and QED, which celebrate the lives and work of famous physicists. Now the field is being paid the highest musical and artistic compliment.