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 ...

Photons, for centuries both a puzzle and a tool, continue to help scientists illuminate nature at the smallest and largest scales. Photons, the fundamental particles of the electromagnetic field that ...

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 ...

Scientists on the ATLAS experiment explored the polarization of W bosons to test the Higgs mechanism and gain a deeper understanding of the first moments after the Big Bang. After the Big Bang, the ...

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate. In 1995, Alexander Grohsjean cut out a story from the local German ...

Documenting the work of building the world’s largest neutrino experiment presents photographers with a unique set of challenges. Discussing her decades-spanning career, photographer Annie Leibovitz ...

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.

Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs died earlier this year. Twelve years ago this week, physicists discovered the particle that bears his name. When researchers at the Large Hadron Collider announced the ...

Don’t know your convolutional neural networks from your boosted decision trees? Symmetry is here to help. It’s time for some deep learning. Check out this list to pick up some new terminology—and ...

A professor at the University of Tennessee reimagines the way we teach STEM with a science-fiction story-based class. In the beginning, a spaceship called the Yggdrasil is sailing through the cosmos ...

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two distinct fundamental forces. That wasn’t always the case. How many fundamental forces are there in our universe? For particle physicists, answering ...

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 ...