Particle physics

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.

Unifying conflicting models into a “Theory of Everything” is the Holy Grail of physics. Now a NASA observatory has conducted an experimental test, scouring the sky for evidence of a hypothetical particle that could tie the universe together.

The Standard Model of particle physics still has some holes in it. Now, a new study outlines how one hypothetical particle, the axion, may be the answer to three separate, massive mysteries of the universe – including why we’re here at all.

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.