Possible Higgs boson signals, but we won’t know for sure until next year
This morning, the spokespeople for the two main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, gave talks on their teams' latest results in the search for the Higgs boson. As expected, the...
Rolling the dice: understanding how physicists hunt for the Higgs
Tomorrow, CERN will be webcasting a talk on the latest results in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to provide other particles with mass. The director of CERN has...
Fast neutrinos, C-P violations, and the shrinking space for the Higgs
It has been a busy week in the world of particle physics, with attention focused on the home of the LHC: CERN. This year, the LHC generated five inverse femtobarns worth of data—nearly half...
Feature: As its Tevatron collider goes dark, Fermilab ponders a muon-rich future
Since the 1980s, the US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the...
Neutrino experiment sees them apparently moving faster than light
Tomorrow, researchers from CERN will be releasing experiment results that suggest neutrinos, the lightest particles we're aware of, may be moving slightly faster than the speed of light. Although the results have not yet...
LHCb detector causes trouble for supersymmetry theory
Two of the general purpose detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, tend to keep a high profile, as they're designed to be able to spot anything that comes out of the collisions—the Higgs, dark...
Simulate proton smashing with updated LHC@home
Particle physics may be all about finding the unknown, but to do that we need a really strong grip on the known. If the Higgs boson is out there, it's just one of a...
Antimatter particles found in orbit held by Earth’s magnetic field
Antimatter has received a lot of research attention here on Earth, but satellite data recently confirmed that antimatter particles, specifically antiprotons, are being held in orbit by the Earth’s magnetic field.
Anti...
Physicists find hints of a light Higgs boson in LHC data
During Ars' trip to Fermilab earlier this spring, the staff was excitedly talking about their expectations for the summer. That's when the high-energy physics community has many of their meetings, and the expectation was......
Japanese detector spotted neutrino oscillations prior to earthquake
Japan's Super-Kamiokande detector was constructed to look for proton decays, but back in 1998, it made history by spotting the first indications of flavor oscillations in neutrinos, in which one type of neutrino (a muon neutrino,...
No new particle after all: Tevatron’s second detector comes up empty
The excitement that has been building regarding a possible new particle spotted in the Tevatron detector has been seriously dampened. The Tevatron's second detector, DZero, has now repeated the analysis performed by the C......
