Sarah Charley

Sarah Charley is senior writer in the Fermilab Office of Communication.

It started with a cough that wouldn’t go away. After years of medical treatment and a successful heart transplant, physicist Avi Yagil partnered with the doctors who gave him a new heart to bring techniques from particle physics into the evaluation of heart-failure patients.

A series of joint NASA and ESA spacewalks four years in the making aims to extend the life of the AMS particle detector. On Nov. 15, astronauts took on a series of tasks ranging in difficulty from zip-tie-cutting to safely launching a piece of equipment into space, all while orbiting the planet at around 5 miles per second. The goal was to fix a component of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an international particle physics experiment, and to extend its study of cosmic rays, dark matter and antimatter for another decade.

Maria Teresa Dova has been instrumental in bringing scientists in Argentina new opportunities to participate in particle physics and astrophysics experiments, including one that co-discovered the Higgs boson.

Researchers at CERN are investigating how very high-energy electrons could help target tumors. The possibility of using high-energy electrons for cancer treatment combined with new experimental dose-delivery techniques poises the medical field for a revolution in cancer treatment.

Working on hardware doesn’t come easily to all physicists, but Francesca Ricci-Tam has learned that what matters most is a willingness to put in the practice.

Our world is governed by general relativity, which sees gravity as the effects of massive objects warping space-time. The world of particle physics, on the other hand, envisions all forces as mediated by force-carrying particles — and ignores gravity entirely. This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three theorists who proposed a way to marry these contradictory descriptions: with a theory called “supergravity.”

A dynamic duo at CERN is planting seeds to foster physics research in Nepal. Like many students in Nepal, they moved abroad to pursue the best higher education opportunities. Now, they are using their unique experiences working at CERN to bring some of these opportunities back to his home country.

Physicists meet this week in Granada, Spain, to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Hundreds of scientists from around the globe associated with the European particle physics program are meeting ti discuss and evaluate what Europe’s next collaborative projects should be. The end goal is a consolidated strategy that European research institutions can use to guide their efforts for the next several years.

It’s not always about what you discover. The LHC research program is famous for discovering and studying the long-sought Higgs boson. But out of the spotlight, scientists have been using the LHC for an equally important scientific endeavor: testing, constraining and eliminating hundreds of theories that propose solutions to outstanding problems in physics, such as why the force of gravity is so much weaker than other known forces like electromagnetism.