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01/30/17

Sign of a long-sought asymmetry

A result from the LHCb experiment shows what could be the first evidence of matter and antimatter baryons behaving differently.

03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.

03/01/05

What's in a name?

I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.

03/01/05

The doorkeepers of building 280

Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.

03/01/05

Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe.

03/01/05

Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

Do you know why Louis Victor de Broglie won a Nobel Prize in 1929? Or why a Nobel Prize wasn't given out in 1934? What about Nils Gustaf Dalen's invention of an automatic sun valve beating out Max Planck and Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1912?

03/01/05

Microchip

Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.

03/01/05

The smoking mouse

Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.