A sourdough family started at Fermilab by a graduate student visiting from Texas A&M has continued to expand and flourish.
Symmetry features
Physicist Cristiano Galbiati shifted focus from the search for dark matter to the shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients. The collaboration he began created an easy-to-manufacture ventilator in less than two months.
New results from the T2K experiment in Japan rule out with 99.7% confidence nearly half of the possible range of values that could indicate how neutrinos behave compared to their antimatter counterparts.
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.
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.
To some degree, scientists on all of today’s particle physics experiments share a common challenge: How can they pick out the evidence they are looking for from the overwhelming abundance of all the other stuff in the universe getting in their way? Physicists refer to that stuff — the unwelcome clamor of gamma rays, cosmic rays and radiation crowding particle detectors — as background. They deal with background in their experiments in two ways: by reducing it and by rejecting it.
Grab your cocoa or pumpkin spice — as today we examine what’s naughty and nice.
The year 2019 was a banner one for Albert Einstein: It included the first image of a black hole and the 100th anniversary of the 1919 solar eclipse expeditions that validated his theory of general relativity. Learn more about both, plus topics such as quantum theory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the science (and fiction) of “Game of Thrones” in Symmetry writer Mike Perricone’s annual list of new popular physics books.
Enormous scientific collaborations are made up of hundreds upon thousands of individuals, each with their own story. Online collections of profiles, such as Faces of DUNE, the Dark Energy Survey’s Scientist of the Week blog and Humans of LIGO, reveal the sometimes-ignored human sides of scientists.
Scientists who moved from particle physics or astrophysics to medical physics sit down with Symmetry to talk about life, science and career changes.