Whereas matter on Earth and in stars is made of atoms and nuclei, scientists know that dark matter must be made of something else. Neutralinos are a prime candidate.
Behind every big breakthrough is a series of small steps that build on each other to enhance our understanding of the universe. At Fermilab's Tevatron Collider, physicists have been telling the unfolding story of their experiments in weekly installments for more than five years.
On September 10, physicists and physics enthusiasts around the world watched expectantly as CERN attempted to circulate particle beams in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time.
US particle physics is pushing forward on three frontiers. Each has a unique approach to making discoveries, and all three are essential to answering key questions about the laws of nature and the cosmos.
Some days Jerry Zimmerman calmly follows his typical morning routine and joins countless other suburbanites on the road to work. Then there are the other days. Those days Zimmerman takes on an alter-persona.
The search for dark matter strikes a new note with a multimedia art work that turns data from an underground experiment into colored light and musical tones.
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.
The Terascale is an energy region named for the tera, or million million, electronvolts of energy needed to access it. Physicists are standing at its threshold, poised to enter this uncharted territory of the subatomic world.
What is this stuff that fills the vacuum of space, accelerates the expansion of the universe, and accounts for 70 percent of everything? More than two dozen experiments aim to find out.
Science is a forward-thinking endeavor: It is more concerned with what can be discovered in the future than what has been learned in the past. Once accomplished, successes are usually taken for granted.
