Elementary particles

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

An experiment designed to hunt for ever elusive dark matter has returned some strange and exciting signals. Out of the three possible explanations, one is unwanted interference – while the other two would herald new physics.

There are billions of tiny particles called neutrinos streaming through your body right now. But where did they come from? Researchers have now traced back some ultra-high energy neutrinos to their points of origin – radio flares from raging quasars.

Dark matter is believed to outnumber regular matter by a ratio of five-to-one, but so far it’s never been directly detected. Now, nuclear physicists have proposed a new candidate particle that might make up the stuff – and we’ve already found it.

The detection of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the decade. Now the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have made the most precise measurement of its mass to date.

Rather than trying to see dark matter, a new experimental design from Stockholm University listens for it instead, using an “axion radio.”

Although the many experiments searching for evidence of dark matter have yet to turn up any solid proof yet, they are making other amazing discoveries. The XENON1T experiment has now revealed the longest half-life ever seen in an element, which is far, far longer than the age of the universe.

If you throw a particle at a wall, there’s a chance that it will suddenly appear on the other side. This is thanks to a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, and now a team of physicists has measured just how long that process takes.

The Large Hadron Collider has been responsible for some of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013. New Atlas is celebrating the 10-year anniversary with a look back at its achievements and what it could help solve in the future.

As tiny as they are, there's a relatively large amount of empty space inside an atom. Now, scientists from Austria and the US have filled in some of those gaps, creating a new state of matter in the form of "giant atoms" filled with other atoms.

​Cosmic rays are raining down over Earth every day, but you’d never know unless you had the right tools. Those tools mostly take the form of bulky, expensive lab equipment, but thanks to an MIT team, you can now build your own detector for US$100 – small enough to take on a plane or the subway.​

Researchers at the University of Sussex have disproved the existence of certain kinds of axions, particles that are a leading candidate for dark matter, and while it may send physicists back to the drawing board, the hunt can be more focused in future.