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 ...

What a proton is depends on how you look at it, or rather on how hard you hit it. A century after Rutherford’s discovery, our picture of this ubiquitous particle is coming into focus, says Amanda ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

From targets to absorbers, beam-intercepting devices are vital to CERN’s accelerator complex. Marco Calviani describes the major upgrades taking place to prepare for the high-luminosity LHC, and the ...

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 ...

The unknown origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe looms large in the scientific imagination. Boris Kayser explains how neutrino physicists are now closing in on a crucial ...