The model we have for understanding the universe’s fundamental particles is a bit like a gearbox: one tiny change to any one single particles’ properties throws off the mechanics of the other ...

The masses of fundamental particles such as the Z and W bosons could have arisen from the twisted geometry of hidden dimensions, a new theoretical paper has demonstrated. The work has outlined a way ...

The Committee on Elementary-Particle Physics was convened by the National Research Council's Board on Physics and Astronomy to assess the field of elementary-particle physics as part of the survey ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when reading this story: When you drill down into the very fabric of reality—where elementary particles make up the matter that is you and me and everything around us in three ...

Javier Duarte kicked off his scientific career by witnessing the biggest particle physics event in decades. On July 4, 2012, scientists at the laboratory CERN near Geneva announced the discovery of ...

Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

As a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, one of the most frequent questions I am asked is, “When are you going to find something?” Resisting the temptation to sarcastically ...

Why didn’t the universe annihilate itself moments after the big bang? A new finding at Cern on the French-Swiss border brings us closer to answering this fundamental question about why matter ...

Forget about turtles; for all practical purposes, it’s really particles all the way down. Consider the seemingly simple matter of their size, the very thing that makes them so alien. We’re typically ...

Peter Higgs stands in front of a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum in London in 2013. The year before, researchers smashing protons together at the collidor had discovered ...

THE first thing you need to know is that virtual particles, which are impossible to avoid if you want to understand how the fundamental forces of nature animate matter, aren’t really particles at all.