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Particle Physics
In the early stages of the hot Big Bang, matter and antimatter were (almost) balanced. After a brief while, matter won out. Here's how.
For a substantial fraction of a second after the Big Bang, there was only a quark-gluon plasma. Here's how protons and neutrons arose.
In the very early Universe, practically all particles were massless. Then the Higgs symmetry broke, and suddenly everything was different.
In the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have existed. Why aren't they equal today?
Some 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe became hot, dense, and filled with high-energy quanta all at once. Here's what it was like.
The miniaturization of particle accelerators could disrupt medical science.
Scientists have been chasing the dream of harnessing the reactions that power the Sun since the dawn of the atomic era. Interest, and investment, in the carbon-free energy source is heating up.
Scientists will be able to make detailed "Claymation-like" movies of chemical reactions.
The term "zero-point energy" has at least two meanings, one that is innocuous and one that is a great deal sexier (and scammier).
In our Universe, all stable atomic nuclei have protons in them; there's no stable "neutronium" at all. But what's the reason why?
Back during the hot Big Bang, it wasn't just charged particles and photons that were created, but also neutrinos. Where are they now?
From unexplained tracks in a balloon-borne experiment to cosmic rays on Earth, the unstable muon was particle physics' biggest surprise.
2023's Nobel Prize was awarded for studying physics on tiny, attosecond-level timescales. Too bad that particle physics happens even faster.
The question of why the Universe is the way it is is an ancient one, and none of the answers we have come up with are satisfying.
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell "up" provided hope for warp drive. Here's how it all fell apart.
The laws of physics don't prefer matter over antimatter. So how can we be certain that distant stars & galaxies aren't made of antimatter?
Sci-fi enthusiasts have long hoped that a substance called antimatter might experience gravity opposite that of ordinary matter. It doesn't.
The hot Big Bang was an energetic, brilliantly luminous event. Today's Universe is alight with stars. But in between, the dark ages ruled.
An enormous amount of antimatter is coming from our galactic center. But the culprit probably isn't dark matter, but merely neutron stars.
Is it like a tiny ball — or what?
Neutrons can be stable when bound into an atomic nucleus, but free neutrons decay away in mere minutes. So how are neutron stars stable?
Dark matter hasn't been directly detected, but some form of invisible matter is clearly gravitating. Could the graviton hold the answer?
Three fundamental forces matter inside an atom, but gravity is mind-bogglingly weak on those scales. Could extra dimensions explain why?
Positron emission tomography (PET) scans use positrons — the antimatter equivalent of an electron — to locate cancer in the body.
By probing the Universe on atomic scales and smaller, we can reveal the entirety of the Standard Model, and with it, the quantum Universe.
As the Manhattan Project headed for completion, German attempts to build a nuclear weapon had already been dismantled.
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery... consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
LK-99, almost certainly, isn't a room-temperature superconductor. The underlying physics of the phenomenon helps us understand why.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.