On July 21, 2000, the DONUT collaboration at Fermilab announced the detection of tau neutrinos for the first time. Here are a ...

The CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have observed an unforeseen feature in the behaviour of top ...

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics project currently under construction on a mountaintop in Chile, will be named for astronomer Vera Rubin, a key figure in the ...

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.

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

Neutrinos are notoriously aloof, but it’s not entirely their fault. Neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, and they are everywhere. Every second, more than 6 trillion ...

The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle known to be scalar, meaning it has no quantum spin. This fact answers questions about our universe, but it also raises new ones.

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 ...

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 force—it was just the natural tendency of objects to ...

Gamma rays are the most energetic type of light, packing a punch strong enough to pierce through metal or concrete barriers. More energetic than X-rays, they are born in the chaos of exploding stars, ...

Handedness—and the related concept of chirality—are double-sided ways of understanding how matter breaks symmetries.