As passengers boarded the train in a Berlin suburb, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider greeted them: Imagine you are a proton and this train is the LHC tunnel. You will travel 37 km, slightly more than the 27 km it takes the protons to circle the LHC tunnel.
In May 1983, physicists on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson.
Donald Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley, won a Nobel Prize for inventing the bubble chamber in 1952 as a way of detecting subatomic particles. Now a University of Chicago professor, Juan Collar, is leading the charge to make the bubble chamber cool and cutting-edge again.
A Faraday Cup is (pick one) 1) a gadget named after the great experimentalist Michael Faraday, used to measure the current of a charged-particle beam, or 2) an award that recognizes the inventors of innovative instruments for particle accelerators.
When you hear the descending flurry of 16th notes in the trumpets, you know the gamma rays are coming. They speed toward the detector in the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope in chromatically harmonized notes.