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.
Artist Robert Lang has folded intricate paper sculptures from flat sheets that, in some cases, started out over nine feet long. He uses the same method many of us used to make cranes and party hats in elementary schoola series of precise folds. But Langs designs are far more complex.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This memo by John Yoh, written on November 17, 1976, certainly caught the attention of the Columbia-Fermilab-Stony Brook collaboration (Fermilab experiment E288).