Tag

Particle Physics

All articles tagged with #particle physics

science13 hours ago•10 min saved

Exotic-hadron hunt uncovers two surprising structures in the strangeonium sector

Physicists at Jefferson Lab’s GlueX experiment, using a high-intensity photon beam, found two unexpected structures near the known Y(2175) instead of confirming it: Y(2240) with about 5σ significance and X(1830) with about 3σ. While their exact nature is not yet known, these results suggest unusual quark–gluon configurations and potential gluonic contributions, providing new targets for testing exotic-matter theories and refining understanding of the strong force.

via Interesting Engineering|

#exotic-mesons #particle-physics #science

science4 days ago•159 min saved

Dark Photons Could Still Be Dark Matter, Say New Simulations

New computer simulations show that the conversion of dark photons to ordinary photons in the early universe may not heat the cosmos as much as previously thought, reopening expanded parameter space for dark photon dark matter and potentially guiding new experimental searches.

via Space|

#cosmology #dark-matter #dark-photons

science8 days ago•6 min saved

Glance at a Pure-Force Particle: Scientists Edge Toward Glueball Confirmation

A BEPCII/BESIII collaboration analyzed tens of billions of meson decays and reports the strongest evidence yet that the meson X(2370) is dominated by a glueball—an exotic state made predominantly of gluons, a key prediction of quantum chromodynamics. If confirmed, this reveals a new form of matter and sharpens our understanding of the strong force, though further experiments are needed to solidify the result.

via ScienceAlert|

#besiii #glueball #particle-physics

science9 days ago•8 min saved

Chasing Ghost Particles: How Giant Detectors Unveil Neutrinos

From Pauli’s proposal to a lineage of colossal underground, underwater, and under-ice detectors, scientists have built ever-larger traps to catch neutrinos. Early solar-neutrino measurements at Homestake sparked a long puzzle that was resolved by experiments like Kamiokande, Super-Kamiokande, and SNO, which revealed neutrino oscillations and mass. Today, IceCube, KM3NET, Borexino, JUNO, Hyper-Kamiokande, and DUNE continue the hunt, probing neutrino properties across the cosmos and Earth with unprecedented precision.

via WIRED|

#detectors #neutrino-oscillations #neutrinos

science12 days ago•11 min saved

Gluon-Only Glueball Candidate Sparks QCD Milestone

Physicists report a potential glueball, X(2370), from BEPC II/BESIII data (arXiv July), a hadron made entirely of gluons. While it aligns with Standard Model expectations, the result is not yet definitive and could be another phenomenon; nonetheless it represents a notable step in probing the strong force.

via Hackaday|

#besiii #glueball #gluons

science13 days ago•6 min saved

Strongest Evidence Yet That Glueballs Exist as Pure-Gluon Particles

Physicists at BES III report the strongest evidence to date that a glueball—made entirely of gluons—exists, identifying X(2370) as a flavor-singlet state with a mass of about 2.395 GeV/c^2 and roughly 90% gluon content, aligning with lattice QCD predictions and awaiting independent confirmation.

via arstechnica.com|

#bes-iii #glueball #gluons

physics13 days ago•5 min saved

Physicists report strongest evidence yet for the gluon-only glueball

A BESIII collaboration study analyzing about ten billion J/psi decays presents strong evidence that the X(2370) meson is predominantly a glueball—a bound state of gluons predicted by quantum chromodynamics. A 2024 spin-parity measurement (0−+) aligned with glueball predictions strengthens the case, though no single smoking-gun proof exists. If confirmed, this would demonstrate gluons interacting with themselves and shed light on the origin of mass in protons.

via Nature|

#besiii #glueball #gluons

science23 days ago•4 min saved

LHC Finds Quark-Gluon Plasma Clues in Light-Ion Collisions

Four major LHC experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb) report signs that oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions produce quark-gluon plasma, the primordial matter from the early Universe. Evidence includes parton energy loss, suppression of energetic particles, upsilon-meson suppression, and anisotropic flow, suggesting QGP can form in lighter ions and challenging previous assumptions. Ongoing studies with the HL-LHC aim to study this state in greater detail.

via SciTechDaily|

#lhc #light-ion-collisions #particle-physics

science28 days ago•14 min saved

Ten Extreme Lab Experiments That Mirror Cosmic Forces

A list of ten laboratory recreations of extreme forces—from simulating pandemics and nuclear fallout to creating a black-hole horizon analogue, false vacuum decay, ball lightning, a large bridge under earthquake tests, and CERN’s quark-gluon plasma—showing how scientists study cosmic and catastrophic phenomena safely under strict protocols.

via Listverse|

#cosmic-forces #earthquake-engineering #extreme-lab-experiments

science1 month ago•6 min saved

LHC’s Big Upgrade Aims to Uncover Subtle Clues in the Higgs Frontier

The Large Hadron Collider is entering a multi-year shutdown to become the High-Luminosity LHC, expected to start around 2030 with about seven times more data. This upgrade focuses on replacing detectors with faster, more precise, radiation-hard silicon trackers and adding precision timing to disentangle complex collision events. The goal is to probe Higgs boson properties with unprecedented precision—including rare decays like Higgs to muons or charm quarks and Higgs self-coupling—potentially revealing physics beyond the Standard Model and offering new insights into dark matter and the matter–antimatter imbalance.

via Gizmodo|

#detectors #higgs-boson #high-luminosity-lhc

science1 month ago•88 min saved

CERN to upgrade the LHC to HiLumi, boosting collisions by about 10x through 2030

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has entered a four-year Long Shutdown 3 to upgrade into the High-Luminosity LHC, which will raise collision rates by about tenfold and enable roughly 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime. The upgrade, which involves replacing thousands of magnets and other components, aims to deliver a much larger data set to probe the Higgs, dark matter, and the early universe. Operations are slated to resume in 2030 and continue into the 2040s, after which a new, higher-energy accelerator may replace it.

via Live Science|

#cern #higgs-boson #hilumi-lhc

science2 months ago•10 min saved

Chasing Ghost Particles: The Global Quest to Catch Neutrinos

Physicists have built some of the world’s most ambitious detectors—buried underground, underwater, and under Antarctic ice—to catch neutrinos, elusive particles that rarely interact with matter. From Pauli’s proposal and the first detection in the 1950s to solar-neutrino puzzles and modern observatories like Kamiokande, Super-Kamiokande, SNO, IceCube, KM3NeT, JUNO, DUNE, and Hyper-K, the field has shown neutrinos come in flavors that oscillate due to mass, guiding experimental design and enabling study of stars, the cosmos, and fundamental physics.

via Quanta Magazine|

#astrophysics #neutrino-detectors #neutrino-oscillations

science2 months ago•13 min saved

Counting Particles Reveals 995.5 Degrees of Freedom in the Standard Model

The article explains that counting elementary particles isn’t straightforward: textbooks list 17, but including antiparticles, color charges, chirality, and polarization expands the tally; a 2011 theorem shows the Standard Model’s effective degrees of freedom total 995.5, meaning the true count depends on energy scale and how one defines particles.

via Quanta Magazine|

#antimatter #degrees-of-freedom #particle-physics

science2 months ago•3 min saved

JUNO Unveils Early Clues in the Neutrino Flavor Mystery

JUNO, a 20-ktonne underground detector in China, released two months of data showing precise measurements of how neutrinos change flavor and offering clues about their masses; the detector observes electron antineutrinos from nearby reactors via inverse beta decay and aims to resolve the neutrino-mass hierarchy, with cross-checks expected from Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE in the coming decade; findings published in Nature.

via ScienceAlert|

#antineutrinos #juno #neutrino-flavors

physics2 months ago•6 min saved

JUNO sharpens neutrino-oscillation picture, edging toward mass hierarchy

With about two months of data, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) measured two key reactor-neutrino oscillation parameters with 1.6× better precision than decades of previous experiments. The results, published in Nature, advance the effort to determine the neutrino mass ordering and shed light on the origin of neutrino masses, using a 20,000‑ton scintillator detector instrumented with 43,000 photomultiplier tubes observing reactor antineutrinos ~53 km away.

via Nature|

#juno #neutrino-mass #neutrino-oscillation