News

From Gizmodo, April 9, 2018: Some folks are excited about an especially tiny (and especially weird) dark matter candidate that happens to be named after a laundry detergent: the axion. Fermilab is a collaborator on the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment, and scientists on ADMX at the University of Washington think they’re ready to spot this theoretical particle.

From Science News, April 9, 2018: For the first time, physicists are snooping on some of the likeliest hiding places for hypothetical subatomic particles called axions, which could make up dark matter. So far, no traces of the particles have been found, scientists with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment, ADMX, report April 9 in Physical Review Letters.

From UPI, April 9, 2018: For the first time, scientists have precisely measured the interactions between neutrinos hitting the atomic nuclei in the heart of the MiniBooNE neutrino detector. The findings — detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters — remove much of the uncertainty undermining theoretical models of neutrino oscillations and interactions.

It doesn’t seem like collisions of particles with no mass should be able to produce the “mass-giving” boson, the Higgs. But every other second at the LHC, they do.