Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Apr 25, 2019

Inside Giant Atom Smasher, Physicists See the Impossible: Light Interacting with Light

In case you didn't realize it, photons are tiny little bits of light. In fact, they're the smallest bit of light possible. When you turn on a lamp, gigantic numbers of photons spring from that bulb and slam into your eyes, where they are absorbed by your retina and turned...

Apr 29, 2019

Faster-Than-Light Particles Emit Superbright Gamma Rays that Circle Pulsars

Charged particles travel faster than light through the quantum vacuum of space that surrounds pulsars. As these electrons and protons fly by pulsars, they create the ultrabright gamma-ray flashes emitted by the rapidly twirling neutron stars, new research reveals. These gamma-rays, called Cherenkov emissions, are also found in powerful particle...

Jun 5, 2019

Physicists Search for Monstrous Higgs Particle. It Could Seal the Fate of the Universe.

We all know and love the Higgs boson — which to physicists' chagrin has been mistakenly tagged in the media as the God particle — a subatomic particle first spotted in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) back in 2012. That particle is a piece of a field that permeates all...

Jul 8, 2019

These Odd 'Quasiparticles' Could Finally Unmask Dark Matter

About 80% of all the matter in the cosmos is of a form completely unknown to current physics. We call it dark matter, because as best we can tell it's…dark. Experiments around the world are attempting to capture a stray dark matter particle in hopes of understanding it, but so...

Aug 19, 2019

'Evil-Genius' Neutrino Gun Could Finally Unmask the Tiniest Particles in the Universe

Neutrinos are perhaps the most underrated particles known to humankind. Physicist, smart guy and smart aleck Wolfgang Pauli first proposed their existence in 1930 as a missing puzzle piece — certain nuclear reactions had more going in than they had coming out. Pauli reasoned that something tiny and invisible had...

Aug 23, 2019

Physicists Finally Narrowed Down the Mass of the Tiniest 'Ghost Particle' in the Universe

We're full of neutrinos all the time. They're everywhere, nearly undetectable, flitting through normal matter. We barely know anything about them — not even how heavy they are. But we do know that neutrinos have the potential to alter the shape of the entire universe. And because they have that...

Aug 23, 2019

A Rail Gun the Size of Manhattan Could Reveal the Secrets of the Higgs Boson

Nobody messes with the Large Hadron Collider. It's the supreme particle smasher of the present age, and nothing can touch its energy capabilities or ability to study the frontiers of physics. But all glory is transitory, and nothing lasts forever. Eventually, somewhere around 2035, the lights at this 17-mile-long (27...

Sep 24, 2019

A Strange New Higgs Particle May Have Stolen the Antimatter from Our Universe

Why our universe is swirling with more matter than its bizarre counterpart antimatter — and why we exist at all — is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modern physics. Somehow, when the universe was incredibly young, almost all the antimatter disappeared, leaving just the normal stuff. Theorists have...

Oct 30, 2019

Is a New Particle Changing the Fate of the Universe?

Astronomers around the world are in a bit of a tizzy because they can't seem to agree about how fast the universe is expanding. Ever since our universe emerged from an explosion of a tiny speck of infinite density and gravity, it has been ballooning, and not at a steady...

Dec 9, 2019

Mysterious 'Particle X17' Could Carry a Newfound Fifth Force of Nature, But Most Experts Are Skeptical

Our universe is governed by four fundamental forces. At least that's what physicists have long thought. Now, however, new research suggests that there's a fifth force, a discovery that could upend much of modern physics. On Oct. 23, researchers at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Hungary published a new...

Feb 4, 2020

Oddball sexaquark particles could be immortal, if they exist at all

After decades of poking around in the math behind the glue holding the innards of all matter together, physicists have found a strange hypothetical particle, one that has never appeared in any experiment. Called a sexaquark, the oddball is made up of a funky arrangement of six quarks of various...

May 23, 2020

Strange ice formations may have tricked physicists into seeing mysterious particles that weren't there

What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion? Since March 2016, two mysterious signals from Antarctica have baffled researchers. Twice now, a high-energy particle has seemed to burst straight up out of the ice, tripping detectors on a balloon-borne experiment...

Jun 8, 2020

Why a physicist wants to build a particle collider on the moon

As we probe deeper into the innermost workings of the universe, our particle physics experiments have become ever more complex. In order to reveal the secrets of the tiniest subatomic particles, physicists must make colliders and detectors as cold as possible, remove as much air as possible, and keep them...

Jun 12, 2020

Rare quadruplet 'top quarks' created at world's largest atom smasher

The world's largest atom smasher has given birth to a set of four ultraheavy particles — called top quarks. The formation of these chubby-but-tiny quadruplets, at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, has long been predicted by the Standard Model, the prevailing physics theory that governs subatomic interactions. But...

Aug 6, 2020

Heavy atom spills its guts in decade-long experiment

Wielding proton beams and lasers, physicists have for the first time unlocked one of the key secrets of the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth: astatine. Astatine is a halogen, meaning it shares chemical properties with fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine (all elements that typically bind with metals to form...