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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner ask what makes tetraquarks and pentaquarks tick, revealing them to be at times exotic compact states, at times hadronic molecules and at times both – with much still ...

Oliver James of DNEG, which produced the striking black hole in the film Interstellar, describes the science behind visual effects and the challenges in this fast-growing industry. Gargantua A variant ...

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 ...

Run 3 will take physicists closer to a unified description of QCD phenomenology, from the microscopic level to the emergent bulk properties of the quark–gluon plasma. Alice Ohlson explains. Hot and ...

With less than two years of LHC operations before the start of long-shutdown three (LS3), when the main installation phase of the High-Luminosity LHC will begin, Oliver Brüning and Markus Zerlauth ...

An electron–positron collider to follow the LHC will produce copious Higgs bosons, yielding precise knowledge of this unique particle, explain Keith Ellis and Beate Heinemann. The novelty of the Higgs ...

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.

The development at CERN of magnesium diboride cables and other advanced superconducting systems for the High-Luminosity LHC is also driving applications beyond fundamental research, describes Amalia ...