The muon—the short-lived cousin of the electron—could be the key to understanding relationships between other fundamental particles. And it holds a mystery all its own.
In Gran Sasso National Laboratory’s cavernous Hall B, beneath 1400 meters of rock, amongst huge detectors of neutrinos and dark matter, Italian actor Marco Paolini spoke. And more than one million people listened—and watched.
Particles like the top quark weren’t the only characters to appear at Fermilab’s Tevatron. A physicist waxes nostalgic as scientists prepare to celebrate the accelerator’s contributions to science, technology and society at a symposium this month.
Physicist Jean Tran Thanh Van, creator of one of the most prestigious particle physics conferences, is the king of connections. His humanitarian efforts, combined with his vision of a cohesive international particle physics community, have now led him back to his home country of Vietnam.
Light dark photons? Dark Higgs bosons? Scientists look for signs of these weird-sounding particles in data from BaBar—an experiment designed to explain a completely different mystery.