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High Energy Physics
For decades, theorists have been cooking up "theories of everything" to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?
"Color" with respect to the strong force is just an analogy. Here's how to understand it without colors, group theory, or any advanced math.
We have two descriptions of the Universe that work perfectly well: general relativity and quantum physics. Too bad they don't work together.
Smashing things together at unprecedented energies sounds dangerous. But it's nothing the Universe hasn't already seen, and survived.
Many reactions emit energy, often in large amounts, but cosmic efficiency is another metric altogether. Here's how to maximize your output.
At the upper limits of what's energetically possible, cosmic rays still persist. What happens if a human gets hit by the most energetic one?
The very word "quantum" makes people's imaginations run wild. But chances are you've fallen for at least one of these myths.
Particles are everywhere, including particles from space that stream through the human body. Here's how they prove Einstein's relativity.
The highest-energy particles could be a sign of new, unexpected physics. But the simplest, most mundane explanation is particularly iron-ic.
The Department of Energy's newest mission seeks to make a unified AI platform across all national labs. Will it help US science, or kill it?
As the lightest baryon in the Universe, the proton is thought by many to be eternally stable. But if it isn't, can we observe it decaying?
Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
We've long known we can't go back to infinite temperatures and densities. But the hottest part of the hot Big Bang remains a cosmic mystery.
Quantum mechanics was first discovered on small, microscopic scales. 2025's Nobel Prize brings the quantum and large-scale worlds together.
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
When you don't have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
A next-generation collider is required for studying particle physics at the frontiers. Here's the fastest, cheapest way to get it done.
Amplifying the energy within a laser, over and over, won't get you an infinite amount of energy. There's a fundamental limit due to physics.
Whether you run the clock forward or backward, most of us expect the laws of physics to be the same. A 2012 experiment showed otherwise.
No matter what it is that we discover about reality, the fact that reality itself can be understood remains the most amazing fact of all.
Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we'll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won't be the end.
Can the top quark, the shortest-lived particle of all, bind with anything else? Yes it can! New results at the LHC demonstrate toponium exists.
On Earth, our particle accelerators can reach tera-electron-volt (TeV) energies. Particles from space are thousands of times as energetic.
When theory and experiment disagree, it could mean new physics. This time, they solved the muon g-2 puzzle, and saved the Standard Model.
The laws of nature are almost perfectly symmetric between matter and antimatter, and yet our Universe is made ~100% of matter only. But why?
Empty space itself, the quantum vacuum, could be in either a true, stable state or a false, unstable state. Our fate depends on the answer.
Under extreme conditions, matter takes on properties that lead to remarkable, novel possibilities. Topological superconductors included.
Perhaps the most well-known equation in all of physics is Einstein's E = mc². Does mass or energy increase, then, near the speed of light?
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic structures of all, everything that exists depends on two things: charge and mass.