Researchers on the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment at South Dakota's Sanford Underground Research Facility reported a lone high-energy event in their 10-tonne liquid xenon detector, recorded sometime in 2023 or 2024, that matches the expected signature of a dark matter particle striking an atomic nucleus. The team announced the finding at a physics conference in Japan and posted details in a preprint, while cautioning that a single event is not proof.
CERN halted its injector complex and Antimatter Factory this morning, stopping the final proton and ion beams that had continued running since the LHC itself went dark in June. This completes the transition into Long Shutdown 3, a multi-year pause across the entire accelerator chain. Engineers used the last weeks of operation to gather performance data and finish physics measurements before maintenance begins.
CERN researchers and international collaborators generated quark-gluon plasma—the hot, dense matter thought to have existed microseconds after the Big Bang—by colliding oxygen-16 and neon-20 nuclei, elements far lighter than the lead atoms typically used for such experiments. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, show this exotic state of matter can form in much smaller collisions than previously assumed.
Researchers measured that using scented household cleaning products releases billions to trillions of nanoscale airborne particles into indoor air. The resulting particle concentrations were comparable to pollution levels found near busy roadways, according to the findings.
Researchers measured billions to trillions of tiny airborne particles released when scented cleaning products are used indoors. The particle levels detected were comparable to the kind of pollution seen in urban smog conditions.
CERN is proceeding with a major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider intended to significantly increase the rate of particle collisions, giving physicists more data to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. This follows years in which the collider largely confirmed existing theoretical predictions without producing the unexpected results many researchers had hoped for.
Particle, the AI newsreader startup started by ex-Twitter engineers, has launched Radar, a search engine that transcribes and semantically indexes over 130,000 podcasts to surface quotes and highlights. The product grew out of a popular clip-sourcing feature in Particle's news app and is now offered as a standalone API for AI agents and data buyers, including hedge funds and search platforms like Exa.
Physicists at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II presented new analysis showing the particle X(2370) is likely a glueball, an exotic particle theorized nearly 50 years ago to be made entirely of gluons rather than quarks. The findings, detailed in a preprint shown at a physics conference in Brazil, build on 2024 work that measured the particle's mass and spin, now adding data on its decay modes and flavor-singlet structure.