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 ...

Subatomic physics has shaped both the conduct of war and the treatment of cancer. Joseph Rotblat, who left the Manhattan Project on moral grounds and later advanced radiotherapy, embodies this dual ...

With the story of quarkonia entering its final chapter, John Ellis shares personal recollections of five decades of discoveries and debates about the simplest composite object in QCD, whose history is ...

Orthodox quantum mechanics is empirically flawless, but founded on an awkward interface between quantum systems and classical probes. In this feature, Carlo Rovelli – himself the originator of the ...

David Wallace argues for the ‘decoherent view’ of quantum mechanics, where at the fundamental level there is neither probability nor wavefunction collapse – and for its purest incarnation, the ...

Automated space telescopes are inspiring a new generation of particle accelerators that are primarily operated by AI. Verena Kain highlights four ways machine learning is already making the LHC more ...

Vivian Poulin asks if the tension between a direct measurement of the Hubble constant and constraints from the early universe could be resolved by new physics. On large scales the dominant motion of ...

With a new measurement imminent, the Courier explores the experimental results and theoretical calculations used to predict ‘muon g-2’ – one of particle physics’ most precisely known quantities and ...

Dress rehearsal Preparing to integrate the corrector package (yellow) with the separation and recombination dipole (blue) at the inner-triplet-string test stand at CERN. Credit: M ...

Enrico Chesta, Véronique Ferlet-Cavrois and Markus Brugger highlight seven ways CERN and ESA are working together to further fundamental exploration and innovation in space technologies. Sky map The ...

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 ...

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 ...