Browse Physics

New search for hypothetical particle focuses on old rocks where monopole abundance should be higher.

Invisible sheetlike structures, which might pervade space and contribute to dark matter or dark energy, could be revealed as they pass by Earth-based detectors.

The Millikan oil drop experiment, published in final form in 1913, demonstrated that charge comes in discrete chunks and was a bridge between classical electromagnetism and modern quantum physics.

Researchers have demonstrated the key piece of equipment needed to produce the intense positron beams required for the next generation of particle accelerators.

The idea of inflation–an exponential expansion of the universe in its first moments–was published in 1981, in a paper that imported new ideas from particle physics into theoretical cosmology.

Satellite measurements show that short flashes of gamma rays from thunderstorms mainly shoot straight up–essential information for theorists trying to unravel this mysterious phenomenon.

Quarks can have any one of three colors, but new computer simulations further validate a mathematical simplification where the number of colors is very large.

Researchers confirmed that dust contamination is the main cause of sudden beam failure in high energy electron experiments. They also saw flashes of the dust in video recordings of the beam.

Relic neutrinos from the big bang have come from a region of the universe much nearer than the famous cosmic microwaves, even though they are older.

Ultrahigh energy photons striking matter can transform into rho mesons through an interaction that involves many nuclei simultaneously, a phenomenon that may affect the detection signatures of high-energy particles from space.

Richard Feynman invented the cartoon-like pictures of particle interactions that are essential to particle physicists and published the first one in 1949.

Gamma rays and energetic electrons detected on a Japanese mountaintop confirm that thunderstorms are efficient electron accelerators.

Colliding protons can remain intact but still generate new particles, according to results from Fermilab. A similarly clean process could produce the elusive Higgs particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

A single neutrino left over from the big bang may have a quantum wave (wave function) that stretches across the universe.

A research team used a laser to produce large amounts of anti-electrons, opening up new possibilities for research on exotic astrophysical objects.

The physics community was stunned to learn in the 1950s that some events, unlike billiard ball collisions, follow different rules in their mirror-image versions.

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes the discovery of symmetry breaking in particle physics, which is an essential concept in modern theories of the fundamental forces.

A large fraction of an antimatter beam can reflect off of a wall made of normal matter instead of annihilating. The surprising effect turns out to follow from standard, textbook physics.

If there are building blocks inside quarks, they might be detectable in the form of superdense objects in space.

A calculation suggests that ‘molecules’ made of equal parts matter and antimatter were created for the first time in recent experiments.