Readers following our existential physics coverage may remember a recent breakthrough from CERN concerning matter’s evil twin, antimatter. An outstanding mystery in physics is that our universe contains more matter than antimatter, contradicting most theoretical predictions. Scientists, therefore, understandably want to explain why and how this is the case. CERN announced yet another significant leap […]
Physicists Turned Lead Into Gold—for a Fraction of a Second
Hundreds of years ago, alchemists dreamed of chrysopoeia: turning lead into gold. Scientists at the research institute CERN have achieved this medieval fantasy—if only for a fraction of a second. Physicists used the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to eject three protons from lead atoms—effectively transforming them into gold atoms. Though […]
Neutrinos Have No Business Being This Freaking Small
Physicists have placed a new limit on how big the elusive neutrino can be—one of the universe’s smallest known particles—a limit that makes other subatomic particles look as big as black holes by comparison. In a new result published this week in Science, researchers have put a new upper limit on the mass of this […]
Legendary U.S. Particle Collider Is About to Perform Its Final Smash
After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots—erm, superconducting magnets. The collider’s final run—its 25th—kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded—in fact, transformed into—Brookhaven Lab’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). […]