particle physics
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A Famous Dark Matter Signal Is Probably Coming From Something Else
Physicists have been trying for several years to double-check a signal from an experiment buried in an Italian mountain — a signal that looked an awful lot like a dark matter suspect known as a WIMP. Previous attempts to see that signal with other projects had fallen flat, and now, the experiment most similar to…
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What to Know About the Newly Discovered Tetraquark at the Large Hadron Collider
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics. Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.
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Physicists Discover the Elusive Odderon, First Predicted 50 Years Ago
Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron…
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A Dark Matter Detector Based on a Wind Chime Seems Just Weird Enough to Work
Dark matter physicists may have one of the most frustrating jobs in science. Their work deals with something that must, by almost all models of the universe, exist. But we’ve never found any direct evidence for dark matter. Where other scientists can capture their subjects in a lab and perform experiments on it, scholars of…