Search
High Energy Physics
Protons and neutrons are composite structures: made of quarks and gluons. But knowing they had substructure goes back long before that.
Two discrete symmetries, charge conjugation and parity, must be violated together for our Universe to exist. We haven't found enough of it.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider superseded Fermilab's TeVatron in 2008, but now nears the end of its run. The ambitious FCC project comes next.
At and beyond the current frontiers of knowledge, many physicists have strongly held opinions. Can surveys point the way to breakthroughs?
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
From within our own galaxy to behemoths billions of light-years away, supermassive black holes create jets like nothing else in the cosmos.
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.
1hr 8mins
“An equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, that would allow us to, quote, 'Read the mind of God.'”
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.