In this imaginative film, Symmetry writer Sarah Charley depicts a short story in which a physicist is unable to cook what he wants with the ingredients he has. It’s not easy to get the grocery while sheltering in place, so he decides to use the physics at work in the Large Hadron Collider to get what he needs.
The ADMX experiment trains scientists to deal with real signals—by creating fake ones.
In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider research program jumped into full swing as scientists started collecting physics data from particle collisions in the LHC for the first time. How has this gigantic, global scientific effort affected the world? Symmetry pulled together a few numbers to find out.
Only 1% of the mass of the proton comes from the Higgs field. ALICE scientists examine a process that could help explain the rest.
Only a fraction of collision events that look like they produce a Higgs boson actually produce a Higgs boson. Luckily, it doesn’t matter.
What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.
Those who study particle physics will find that every step of the journey offers a new perspective and new set of responsibilities. Symmetry chats with scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider to hear about differences between seven different rungs on the academic career ladder.
Reina Reyes made headlines for her research at Princeton testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity; now she’s home in the Philippines, using her physics background to make her mark in different ways.
There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.
The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment has achieved its goal of squeezing a beam of muons before they decay.