latest news

10/28/19

DESI opens its 5000 eyes

With installation near completion, the new sky-surveying instrument has begun final testing.

10/21/19

Scientists combine forces to study first light

Scientists are designing a next-generation experiment to map the Big Bang’s relic afterglow.

View full archive

Conceptual illustration of a pie with a lattice crust

Explain it in 60 Seconds: Lattice QCD

07/25/24

Sarah Charley

Lattice gauge theory, or lattice QCD, is a calculation method that helps scientists make predictions about the behavior of quarks at low energies.

03/01/12

Data from the world’s most powerful particle colliders should shed light on a 100-year-old astrophysics mystery, but even they cannot explain the perplexing properties of the universe’s most energetic particles. Are ultra-high-energy cosmic rays heavier than expected?

03/01/12

The brain behind TV's The Big Bang Theory

For those who live, breathe and laugh physics, one show entangles them all: The Big Bang Theory. To make the show's jokes timely and accurate, while sprinkling the sets with authentic scientific plots and posters, the show's writers depend on one physicist, David Saltzberg.

02/01/12

Cosmic microwave background

Cosmic microwave background is the oldest light in the universe.

02/01/12

W precision measurement

The W boson mass is one of the fundamental ingredients that scientists use to calculate particle physics properties, such as the most likely mass of the soughtafter Higgs particle.

02/01/12

A brainy look at dark matter

Have you ever sat in an open field at night, looked up at the vast number of stars and thought, “I bet an artificial brain would come in handy for making sense of all this”? You might if you were planning the best way for NASA to map the sky.

02/01/12

The Tevatron's proud legacy

Just after 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 30, Fermilab accelerator pioneer Helen Edwards prepared to stop the circulation of subatomic particles in the Tevatron collider for the last time. She was a fitting choice; Edwards and her husband, Don, had led the Tevatron start-up nearly three decades earlier.

02/01/12

A stamp of her own

Maria Goeppert Mayer left an indelible stamp on the history of physics. Now the US Postal Service has honored the nuclear physicist with a stamp of her own.

02/01/12

Kate Findlay: Collider quilts

A 2008 newspaper article about the Large Hadron Collider inspired Kate Findlay to start a years-long quilting project.

View full archive