Symmetry

Respondents to Symmetry’s survey about what it’s like to earn a Ph.D. in particle physics or astrophysics offer their views of the experience. Nearly 2,000 people worldwide complete the scientific rite of passage each year. Yet for many people, the process remains mysterious.
The more than 300 responses to Symmetry’s survey described a challenging, multifaceted experience that goes far beyond job training, and even beyond the scientific goal of studying the fundamental nature of the universe.

A new observation by the LHCb experiment finds that charm quarks behave differently than their antiparticle counterparts.

What if you could accelerate particles to higher energies in only a few meters? This is the alluring potential of an up-and-coming technology called plasma wakefield acceleration. Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size.

Scientists have proposed building the International Linear Collider, which would be the longest linear collider in the world, in the Kitakami mountains in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan. Scientists had called on the Japanese government to come to a decision about whether they support hosting the ILC by today’s meeting of the International Committee for Future Accelerators. The Japanese government declined to stake a claim to hosting the ILC.

One day in 2017, the idea to detect particles that had potentially been escaping the LHC for years unnoticed by the gigantic detectors suddenly became feasible. The story of the latest experiment approved for installation at the Large Hadron Collider starts with a theorist and a question about dark matter.

Given the popularity of our first article about physics concepts with deceptively common names, Symmetry is back with 10 more seemingly normal words that mean something different in a science context. Some of this science sounds awfully familiar.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will manage unprecedented volumes of data produced each night. Scheduled to come online in the early 2020s, the LSST will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera to photograph a giant swath of the heavens. It’ll keep it up for 10 years, every night with a clear sky, creating the world’s largest astronomical stop-motion movie.

With the warmth of holiday cheer in the air, some physicists decided to hit the pub after a conference in December 2014 and do what many physicists tend to do after work: keep talking about physics. That evening’s topic of conversation: dark energy particles. The chat would lead to a new line of investigation at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Every second, the universe grows a little bigger. Scientists are using the LHC to try to find out why.

If one wanted to follow the recipe for the universe, it would call for about 14 parts dark energy, 5 parts dark matter and 1 part visible matter. In a perpetually expanding cosmic landscape that reaches far beyond what even the most powerful telescopes can see, this might be hard to visualize. Physicists Katy Grimm and Katharine Leney found a solution for this: Use this recipe for the cosmos to bake a proportionally correct dark matter cake.

Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.