Keeping high-power particle accelerators at peak performance requires advanced and precise control systems. For example, the primary research machine at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas ...

The Sun unleashes a torrent of charged particles. Some of them slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering breathtaking auroras in the night sky. But for equipment that’s orbiting our planet in outer ...

A supercharged neutrino that smashed into our planet in 2023 may have been spit out by an exploding primordial black hole with a "dark charge." If true, this theory could lead to a definitive catalog ...

Cosmic rays are extremely fast, charged particles that travel through space at nearly the speed of light. The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

Scientists at Fermilab’s MicroBooNE experiment have ruled out the existence of the elusive sterile neutrino, a particle proposed for decades to explain puzzling neutrino behavior. Their high-precision ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: It used to be thought that bizarre interactions between subatomic particles known as neutrinos could be explained by another type of neutrino. The ...

Every time two beams of particles collide inside an accelerator, the universe lets us in on a little secret. Sometimes it's a particle no one has ever seen. Other times, it's a fleeting glimpse of ...

Forget about turtles; for all practical purposes, it’s really particles all the way down. Consider the seemingly simple matter of their size, the very thing that makes them so alien. We’re typically ...

Scientists are on the trail of a mysterious five-particle structure that could challenge one of the biggest theories in physics: string theory. This rare particle—never seen before and predicted not ...

An extremely high-energy particle that was spotted tearing through Earth has left scientists flummoxed ever since it was discovered. While many researchers believe the particle was an unusual neutrino ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working ...