Large Hadron Collider – Quanta Magazine

Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 17 May 2023 18:40:14 +0000

By definition, the universe seems like it should be the totality of everything that exists. Yet a variety of arguments emerging from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics hint that there could also be unobservable universes beyond our own that follow different laws of nature. While the existence of a multiverse is speculative, for many physicists it represents a plausible explanation...

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The Mathematical Structure of Particle Collisions Comes Into View

Charlie Wood — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:00:32 +0000

When particle physicists try to model experiments, they confront an impossible calculation — an infinitely long equation that lies beyond the reach of modern mathematics. Fortunately, they can generate largely accurate predictions without seeing this arcane math all the way through. By cutting the calculation short, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe make forecasts that match...

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Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

Charlie Wood — Tue, 26 May 2020 14:20:21 +0000

Amid the chaotic chains of events that ensue when protons smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, one particle has popped up that appears to go to pieces in a peculiar way. All eyes are on the B meson, a yoked pair of quark particles. Having caught whiffs of unexpected B meson behavior before, researchers with the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) have spent years...

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A Call for Courage as Physicists Confront Collider Dilemma

Thomas Lewton — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 13:45:58 +0000

All the world is built out of 17 known elementary particles. Carlo Rubbia led the team that discovered two of them. In 1984, Rubbia shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Simon van der Meer for their “decisive contributions” to the experiment that, the year before, had turned up the W and Z bosons. These particles convey one of the four fundamental forces, called the weak force...

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Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting

Joshua Roebke — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 15:00:53 +0000

In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since. One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison...

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