In lead collisions at the LHC, some of the strongest electromagnetic fields in the universe bombard the inside of the beam pipe with radioactive gold. By following the collision fragments, John Jowett ...

Frontier instruments like the LHC and its detectors not only push back the boundaries of our knowledge, but also catalyse innovative technology for medical applications, writes Manuela Cirilli.

From targets to absorbers, beam-intercepting devices are vital to CERN’s accelerator complex. Marco Calviani describes the major upgrades taking place to prepare for the high-luminosity LHC, and the ...

Jochen Klein and Marco van Leeuwen describe the physics motivation, detector concept and projected performance of a next-generation heavy-ion programme for LHC Runs 5 and 6. Brand new ALICE 3 is built ...

Louis Lyons traces the origins of the “five sigma” criterion in particle physics, and asks whether it remains a relevant marker for claiming the discovery of new physics. Disentanglement A Jackson ...

In the summer of 1968, while a visitor in CERN’s theory division, Gabriele Veneziano wrote a paper titled “Construction of a crossing-symmetric, Regge behaved amplitude for linearly-rising ...

Patrick Koppenburg and Marco Pappagallo survey the 23 exotic hadrons discovered at the LHC so far. Twenty-three exotic states Five pentaquarks and 18 tetraquarks have been discovered so far at the LHC ...

With a new measurement imminent, the Courier explores the experimental results and theoretical calculations used to predict ‘muon g-2’ – one of particle physics’ most precisely known quantities and ...

André de Gouvêa explains why neutrino masses imply the existence of new fundamental fields. Misfits Massive neutrinos are not part of the Standard Model. Credit: Symmetry After all these years, ...

Before the discovery of quarks, Nicola Cabibbo arrived at the correct formulation of the mechanism responsible for quark mixing. Luciano Maiani, Guido Martinelli and Giorgio Parisi recount Cabibbo’s ...

What a proton is depends on how you look at it, or rather on how hard you hit it. A century after Rutherford’s discovery, our picture of this ubiquitous particle is coming into focus, says Amanda ...

Vivian Poulin asks if the tension between a direct measurement of the Hubble constant and constraints from the early universe could be resolved by new physics. On large scales the dominant motion of ...