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04/25/18

First collisions at Belle II

The Japan-based experiment is one step closer to answering mystifying questions about antimatter.

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Illustration of a W boson among a pattern of masks

Explain it in 60 seconds: W boson

09/10/24

Josh Bendavid and Sarah Charley

Meet the short-lived particle that helps the sun shine.

02/01/07

BaBar's window on the weak force

The sun is shining; the Earth is warm instead of icy. Life is good, thanks to the weak force. One of the four known forces that shape the universe, the weak force sustains our lives, driving the nuclear reactions that power the sun and heat the Earth’s core. It’s also tremendously useful.

02/01/07

Engineering big upgrades

How do you renovate a delicate, irreplaceable detector? Very carefully. During the last four months of 2006, the BaBar collaboration at SLAC successfully replaced a prematurely aging muon identification system.

02/01/07

Evolution of a collider

As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.

12/01/06

“Dirty bubble chamber”

Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe

12/01/06

Raising the flags

Security officers raise and lower 20 flags in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall every day. Each flag represents a country that researchers come from to work at the lab. "The problem is that there are twenty flag poles," says Fermilab's Roy Rubinstein.

An illustration of a person walking up a flight of stairs

12/01/06

Postdocs

Postdocs are temporary research positions for scientists who have completed their PhDs.

12/01/06

The Tevatron brings it on

As work continues to complete the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and plans develop around the world for an International Linear Collider, one accelerator at the energy frontier is open for business right now. At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron collider is making discoveries.

12/01/06

A project worth its salt

The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.

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