The Standard Model

The world’s most sensitive dark matter detector is ready to tackle one of the most perplexing mysteries of the universe. Over 50 times more sensitive than others, LUX-ZEPLIN lurks quietly a mile underground, waiting for these hypothetical particles.

A collaboration of physicists has made the most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson. The new measurement of this key particle differs drastically from the Standard Model's predictions– and it may unravel physics as we know it.

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider probes the fringes of known physics, and now the facility has found particles not behaving as predicted. While it’s early days, the discovery hints at the existence of new particles or forces beyond the Standard Model.

The Standard Model of particle physics still has some holes in it. Now, a new study outlines how one hypothetical particle, the axion, may be the answer to three separate, massive mysteries of the universe – including why we’re here at all.

The detection of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the decade. Now the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have made the most precise measurement of its mass to date.

An astrophysicist from Oxford has put forward a new theory that suggests that dark matter and dark energy are actually part of the same phenomenon: a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.

Next time you’re untangling your earbuds, remember that knots may have played a crucial part in kickstarting our universe, and without them we wouldn’t live in 3D. That’s the strange story pitched by physicists in a new paper, to help plug a few plot holes in the origin story of the universe.

​Matter’s mysterious twin, antimatter, has become slightly less mysterious, thanks to new research at the CERN particle physics lab. Scientists have measured the optical spectrum of antihydrogen for the first time to check if antimatter behaves as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

A new study at Case Western Reserve University is now advancing the radical new hypothesis that dark matter may in fact be made not of exotic subatomic particles, but rather of macroscopic objects which would mass anywhere from a tennis ball to a dwarf planet and as dense as a neutron star.

The study of archaeology has long been carried out using tools from the physics lab. What is less well known is that archaeology has also made substantial contributions to physics. This is the story of old lead; why it is important to physics, and what ethical problems it presents to both sciences.

Following a last-minute delay, physicists Francois Englert and Peter Higgs were today jointly awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their independent invention of the Higgs mechanism, which supplies fundamental particles with mass.