What’s in a name? Reflecting their mystery, the first exotic states were named X, Y and Z. Later on, the proliferation of exotic states required an extension of the particle naming scheme. Manifestly ...

Disentanglement A Jackson Pollock- inspired artwork makes one want to discover whether the pattern is random, created by a computer, or contains evidence of something new. Credit: iStock/susaro The ...

How did winning a Special Breakthrough Prize last year compare with the Nobel Prize? Deep mind Steven Weinberg is director of the theory research group, University of Texas at Austin. Credit: M ...

Misfits Massive neutrinos are not part of the Standard Model. Credit: Symmetry After all these years, neutrinos remain extraordinary – and somewhat deceptive. The experimental success of the ...

LHC physics Effective field theory enables a deeper understanding of complex physics processes at the LHC, such as the above production of Higgs bosons in ATLAS. Credit: ATLAS-CONF-2022-032 ...

Testing CP symmetry The three neutrino mass eigenstates mix to make electron, muon and tau neutrinos according to the Pontecorvo– Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata (PMNS) matrix, which describes three rotations ...

Clocking gravity Artist’s interpretation of an array of pulsars (spinning neutron stars that emit radio waves) being affected by a gravitational wave produced by a supermassive black-hole binary in a ...

Link to the future Tests at CERN of a full-scale 120 kA MgB 2 -based superconducting link “Demo 3”, colloquially known as the “python”, for the High-Luminosity LHC. Credit: CERN The era of ...

Gargantua A variant of the black-hole accretion disk seen in the film Interstellar. Credit: DNEG/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./CQG 32 065001 Oliver James is chief scientist of the world’s biggest ...

Vacuum fluctuation The fine details of “hadronic vacuum polarisation” could be the difference between reinforcing the SM and challenging it. Credit: D Zemba, Pennsylvania State University Fundamental ...

Ten years have passed since the first high-energy proton–proton collisions took place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Almost 20 more are foreseen for the completion of the full LHC programme. The ...

Brand new ALICE 3 is built around a high-resolution tracker with a specialised vertex detector within the beam pipe, housed in a superconducting solenoidal magnet and complemented by several detectors ...