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.
One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists have recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. Their piece, a bright blue and white sculpture of tracks of microscopic bubbles in a bubble chamber, was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. To find the perfect bubble chamber image to recreate, they scrolled through hundreds of these photographs in the archive at Fermilab.
Fermilab’s Liz Sexton-Kennedy talks to Symmetry about her lifelong drive to learn and how it led to her current role as chief information officer for Fermilab. Jim Daley spoke to Sexton-Kennedy about her experiences in STEM, her career at Fermilab and a bit about herself.
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.
Fermilab’s Inclusivity Journal Club seeks answers to difficult social questions in science. A typical meeting includes physicists and postdoctoral researchers as well as non-science staff; students are also welcome to attend. Members read and discuss reports and peer-reviewed papers that address issues such as sexual harassment, implicit bias and best practices for expanding inclusivity.
‘Tis the season for friends, family and funny physics fill-ins. Here at Symmetry, we’ve taken a page from Mad Libs, those short stories designed to trick you into learning parts of speech, and created some science-themed Lab Libs (to trick you into learning science). Simply fill in the blanks to create original science stories.
Symmetry writer Mike Perricone presents his annual compilation of new popular science books related to particle physics and astrophysics. The array that Symmetry readers might have encountered in 2018 ranges from the philosophical to the whimsical.
The mentorship of a scientist on the CMS experiment meant everything to Evan Coleman, a former physics undergraduate at Brown University. What do you give a physicist who helped discover a fundamental particle and jump-started your science career? Something individual, artistic and science-themed.
A proton describes its final moments in the Large Hadron Collider. During its second run, between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN collided about 16 million billion particle pairs. This 3-minute animation is the story of one of them.