latest news

11/22/17

A win for physics and geology

For the first time, scientists have measured the rate at which high-energy neutrinos are absorbed by our planet, a development that could lead to discoveries about physics and the Earth.

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Muons: Emblems of discovery

01/13/26

Diana Kwon

Once a surprise to physicists, these particles are useful tools inside and outside the realm of particle physics.

03/01/05

Good-natured community relations

Working at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, you never know what projects may come your way. So when Helen Quinn, head of education outreach at SLAC, asked me to plant trees with a class of fourth graders, I said sure, it's not rocket science.

03/01/05

X-ray blaze on an invisible world

With laser-precise x-ray vision, the Linac Coherent Light Source will be an unprecedented tool to see how ultra-fast, ultra-small things work.

03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.

03/01/05

What's in a name?

I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.

03/01/05

The doorkeepers of building 280

Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.

Illustration of dancers without partners

03/01/05

Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe.

03/01/05

Microchip

Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.

03/01/05

The smoking mouse

Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.

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