The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

Meet the world’s deepest underground physics facilities. A constant shower of energetic subatomic particles rains down on Earth’s surface. Born from cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere, ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and ...

Astronomers use brokers to identify which signals to pursue in an endless stream of alerts. Looking up at the stars at night, it may not be obvious that the universe is constantly changing. But it is: ...

Matter and antimatter behave differently. Scientists hope that investigating how might someday explain why we exist. One of the great puzzles for scientists is why there is more matter than antimatter ...

Although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark. There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make ...

A possible explanation for the lightness of neutrinos could help answer some big questions about the universe. Mass is a fundamental property of matter, but there’s still a lot about it we don’t ...

A team of young scientists paused their new physics searches to develop an innovative machine-learning tool, which is now helping them narrow in on a rare and messy decay of the Higgs boson. Physicist ...

Over time, particle physics and astrophysics and computing have built upon one another’s successes. That coevolution continues today. In the mid-twentieth century, particle physicists were peering ...