Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

Deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland is the most massive, most ambitious experiment ever undertaken by humanity. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator that uses a ...

The key test passed by sPHENIX to prove it is ready to measure the properties of quark-gluon plasma is called a "standard ...

A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. It uses magnetic and electric fields to speed up charged particles like protons or ions to very high speeds. This allows the particles to collide with ...

The cows grazing by the roads outside Geneva, Switzerland, have witnessed some pretty strange things these past few years: Trucks roll by carrying big, superconducting magnets that look like missiles, ...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cluster satellites have discovered that cosmic particle accelerators are more efficient than previously thought. The discovery has revealed the initial stages of ...

We only recently figured out where cosmic rays are coming from. Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but a ...

Only 7% of LAist readers currently donate to fund our journalism. Help raise that number, so our nonprofit newsroom stays strong in the face of federal cuts. Donate now. This fall, physicists plan to ...

Just a few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and draped with the wires needed to control the instruments inside. A beam of particles passes through the ...

That's only 3.67 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. If you thought the coldest place on ...

As the challenges of particle physics have become more and more complex, we've had to plan and build larger and larger machines to explore the tiny subatomic world. But now, an international group of ...

Twenty-five feet below ground, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory scientist Spencer Gessner opens a large metal picnic basket. This is not your typical picnic basket filled with cheese, bread and ...