Browse Physics

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.

Researchers propose that the supersymmetric partners of the top and bottom quarks are spin 1 instead of spin 0.

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.

Energetic particle jets created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions might create detectable shock waves as they travel through the quark-gluon plasma.

New arguments based on astrophysical phenomena constrain the possibility that dangerous black holes will be produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

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.

The BABAR collaboration at SLAC has observed the radiative decay of an excited state of bottomonium (the bound state of a bottom quark and its antiparticle) to its ground state η_{b}. Observing this long-sought ground state should enable better tests of quantum chromodynamic calculations of quark interactions and the computational approach called lattice quantum chromodynamics.

Forty years ago, it was predicted that there would be a sharp cutoff in the intensity of the very-high-energy cosmic rays that strike the earth’s surface. Two collaborations—the HiRes and Auger telescopes—are providing compelling evidence for this so-called “GZK effect.”

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.

In the 1950s, in one of the largest physics experiments of its time, two physicists detected the neutrino, a particle postulated by theorists a quarter of a century earlier.

An overlooked gamma-ray production mechanism explains a mysterious source of high-energy radiation from space.

Particles containing strange quarks become lighter when embedded within nuclei, according to experiments that confirm an effect seen previously with up and down quarks.

The positron, antiparticle to the electron, was discovered by accident in 1932.

A tiny black hole could briefly appear in a particle accelerator and then vanish into its own separate universe.

The first detailed measurements of the effects of strange quarks inside protons disagree with theoretical predictions, showing the limitations of theorists’ calculational technology.

A new scheme has captured more antimatter than ever before.

In 1932, the invention of the cyclotron marked the start of modern particle physics.

Mathematically-derived pictures show the structure of quarks inside a proton.

A supernova simulated using state-of-the-art equations doesn’t explode, exposing astrophysicists’ ignorance about neutrino physics.