Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning—but many researchers are not giving up on it yet. The Standard Model of particle physics is ...

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

A team of young scientists paused their new physics searches to develop an innovative machine-learning tool, which is now helping them narrow in on a rare and messy decay of the Higgs boson. Physicist ...

The LHCb experiment at CERN has revealed a fundamental asymmetry in the behavior of particles called baryons. “The reason why it took longer to observe CP violation in baryons than in mesons is down ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

Hadrons count among their number the familiar protons and neutrons that make up our atoms, but they are much more than that. In the early 1900s, physicists were trying to find the source of a ...

The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms, and all those atoms are made of the same three things: electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are very similar particles in most respects.

The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

The Planck scale sets the universe’s minimum limit, beyond which the laws of physics break. In the late 1890s, physicist Max Planck proposed a set of units to simplify the expression of physics laws.

Perplexed by gravity? Don’t let it get you down. Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a ...

Not only are we made of fundamental particles, we also produce them and are constantly bombarded by them throughout the day. Fourteen billion years ago, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe ...

To understand why scientists are excited about detecting a new background, just look to the history of studies of the CMB. There’s a new cosmological background in town. In June, researchers from the ...