Atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are in turn made up of quarks. These are just some of the elementary particles that make up the foundation of modern particle physics. But how do we know about these particles when we can’t see atoms directly, much less their constituents? One of the early methods was through a device …
OMG
When the Large Hadron Collider was frantically searching for the Higgs boson, you could hear murmuring speculation about the possibility of the LHC creating black holes that could destroy the Earth. There was a lawsuit filed against Cern in an effort to prevent such a catastrophe. Part of this was fueled by our love of a good doomsday scenario, but part of it was driven by the idea that the LHC was producing the highest energy collisions ever known. While the LHC is humanity’s highest energy particle collider, it doesn’t produce the highest energy collisions known. Much higher collisions are produced by cosmic rays.
Easing Tension With Neutrinos
a new paper published in Physical Review Letters gives a measure of neutrino mass, and it does so by alleviating the tension between cosmological parameters.
We’ve Got One!
We’ve discovered the Higgs boson. Here’s what we know about it so far.
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Boson
Just what is a boson? And why is the search for the Higgs boson such a big deal?
Five is a Magic Number
When we talk about certainty in physics, we often use the statical measure of 5 sigma, which means there is less than one in a million chance that a result happened randomly.