Particle physics

Princeton physicists have accidentally discovered an unexpected quantum behavior in an insulator that was thought to be unique to metals. The find suggests a brand new type of quantum particle, which the team calls a neutral fermion.

Borexino, a huge underground particle detector in Italy, has picked up a never-before-seen type of neutrino coming from the Sun. These neutrinos confirm a 90-year-old hypothesis and complete our picture of the fusion cycle of the Sun and other stars.

Antimatter is a tricky substance to store and transport, mostly because it annihilates any container you try to put it in. Now CERN researchers have outlined a new antimatter trap designed to safely carry the volatile stuff to new facilities.

Scientists have so far been unable to detect dark matter. But a new detector design, using an array of billions of tiny pendulums, could finally break the silence by searching for the effects of dark matter’s incredibly strong gravitational pull.

Physicists in Germany have measured the shortest timespan ever recorded. The team measured the time it takes for a photon of light to travel the length of a hydrogen molecule, and found it to occur in just trillionths of a billionth of a second.

The Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan has received an upgrade. A rare-earth element called gadolinium has been added to the water in the facility, which will make it more sensitive to neutrinos from more distant and ancient supernovae.

After a two-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is beginning to fire back up. The newest particle accelerator, Linac 4, completed its first test run over the past few weeks, and will produce much more powerful beams.

An extensive search for a hypothetical particle has turned up empty. The sterile neutrino is a proposed subatomic particle that could even be a candidate for the mysterious dark matter, but two new experiments have all but ruled it out.

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.

Headlines lately have been screaming about how scientists in Antarctica have discovered evidence of a parallel universe where time runs backwards. While we seriously wish that was true, a new study has put forward a more realistic explanation.

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.