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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Advanced radio-frequency crab cavities are to be tested for the first time in a proton beam, a vital step towards the high-luminosity LHC upgrade. Cryomodule containing two crab cavities (cuboidal ...

Recent experimental results hint that some electroweak processes are not lepton-flavour independent, contrary to Standard Model expectations. If the effect strengthens as more data are gathered, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Before the discovery of quarks, Nicola Cabibbo arrived at the correct formulation of the mechanism responsible for quark mixing. Luciano Maiani, Guido Martinelli and Giorgio Parisi recount Cabibbo’s ...

Thanks to new theory calculations and keenly awaited measurements of the magnetic moment of the muon, a longstanding anomaly may soon be resolved either in favour of new physics or the Standard Model.

Alexander Lenz argues that the charm quark is an experimental and theoretical enigma that has the potential to shed light on the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe. Threading the needle The ...

Geared for discovery more so than delicacy, the LHC is defying expectations by rivalling lepton colliders for precision. Guillelmo Gomez-Ceballos and Jan Kretzschmar identify five measurements of the ...