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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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, ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

On-chip acceleration pioneers Robert Byer, Joel England, Peter Hommelhoff and Roy Shiloh report on progress to miniaturise accelerators from centimetres to microns. Accelerators on a chip Forty long ...