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Physicists
18 posts
CERN Physicists Probe Nature of Mysterious Particle
Since its discovery 20 years ago physicists have been fascinated by χc1(3872), which is also known as X(3872), trying to understand if it is a conventional charmonium state composed of two quarks or if it is an exotic particle composed of four quarks. Now, the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is closer
CERN Physicists Measure High-Energy Neutrino Interaction Strength
The Forward Search Experiment (FASER) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that are attempting to solve outstanding problems in physics such as the nature of dark matter and the matter-antimatter imbalance in the Universe. Another
Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition
In 2019, Noel and her colleagues began collaborating with two theorists who had come up with an easier way of doing the experiment. They had worked out a way of setting aside one qubit that, like a canary in a coal mine, could serve as a bellwether for the state of the entire chain. The
Physicists See ‘Strange Matter’ Form inside Atomic Nuclei
New research attempts to discern how bizarre particles of strange matter form in the nuclei of atoms Credit: koto_feja/Getty ImagesA new physics result two decades in the making has found a surprisingly complex path for the production of strange matter within atoms. Strange matter is any matter containing the subatomic particles known as strange quarks.
How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and Didn’t)
Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward.“For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling
Physicists Reveal New Dark Matter Candidate: Highly Interactive Particle Relics
In the HighlY Interactive ParticlE Relics (HYPER) model, some time after the formation of dark matter in the early Universe, the strength of its interaction with normal matter increases abruptly — which on the one hand, makes it potentially detectable today and at the same time can explain the abundance of dark matter. Phase transition
Long ago—before humans, before Earth, before even the sun—there was stardust. In time, the young worlds of the solar system would eat up much of that dust as those bodies ballooned into the sun, planets, and moons we know today. But some of the dust survived, pristine, in its original form, locked in places like
Physicists find a new way to measure the properties of a material’s surface layer
Using a process called auger-mediated positron sticking (AMPS), scientists from the Positron Lab in the UTA Department of Physics have developed a new technique that can measure the properties of the topmost atomic layer of materials. This novel spectroscopic tool uses virtual photons to measure the topmost atomic layer’s electronic structure selectively. When incoming positrons
Physicists find signs of pentaquark states and new matter
Until recently, all hadrons could be understood as combinations of a quark and an antiquark, like the J/psi, or combinations of three quarks, like the proton. Despite this, it has long been suspected that other quark combinations are possible—what amounts to new forms of matter. Sometimes a bump in the data is a wonderful new
CERN Physicists Directly Observe Fundamental Phenomenon in Quantum Chromodynamics
In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics. These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower, which culminates in the…