Physicists say they are now almost certain that the curious “Higgs-like particle” revealed last year at CERN is a Higgs boson. Data presented this week at the Rencontres de Moriond meeting in Italy – billed…
- Post Doctoral Research Associate, Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter, Adelaide University
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. Some say with a Higgs that light, One bubble might suffice. You may have heard in the recent media that the world was going to end. Uh, again. Worse…
Striving for agreement between theory and experiment and pushing the boundaries of precision are important parts of the scientific process. With each step in this process we move closer to enlightenment…
There’s an ongoing debate in the world of academic publishing about whether the public should be allowed open access to research publications we all pay for in the first place. “If we are paying for this…
A heavy variant of a particle first observed 25 years ago has been found in the debris of close-to-the-speed-of-light proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva. The particle Chi-b(3P) is…
I can guarantee you that some time in the next two weeks, someone at a barbeque I’m attending will ask me about the Higgs boson. I don’t blame them – it’s interesting stuff – but it’s not “answer-in-30-words-or-less…
It’s the year 2100. You wake up alone in a small, windowless room. The only other thing in the room is a small ball. Maybe the room is located in your city, but maybe it’s inside that new spaceship everyone’s…
The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here” A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar … The media is champing at the bit to proclaim a discovery of faster-than-light travel by a subatomic…
A recent announcement by the research director of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) indicated the Higgs boson – often referred to as the “God particle” – has been excluded at 95% confidence…
The “traditional” beauty of theoretical physics is its equations. If we want to describe something, or the way something behaves, we can write down a relation between some properties we think that thing…
Welcome to If I had a blank cheque … a series in which leading researchers reveal what they could (and would) do in their discipline if money were no object. Today we hear from Dr Jonathan Carroll, Postdoctoral…
There’s nothing like an unexpected result to get physicists excited. So in 2008, when some strange behaviour was detected from a rarely-produced particle known as the “top quark”, there was much interest…
