Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron ...

Particle accelerators are often framed as exotic machines built only to chase obscure particles, but they are really precision tools that use electric fields and magnets to steer tiny beams of matter ...

A computer-generated image based on a generative diffusion process shows 2D projections of a particle accelerator beam. Starting from pure noise, signals from the accelerator adaptively guide the ...

Deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland is the most massive, most ambitious experiment ever undertaken by humanity. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator that uses a ...

Physicists have worked out how to make beams of muons without using a huge particle accelerator 1. Muons are subatomic particles that form when cosmic rays collide with particles in the Earth’s upper ...

Semiconductor chips are among the smallest and most detailed objects humans can manufacture. Shrinking the scale and upping the complexity is a fight against the limits of physics, and optical ...

Particle accelerators are usually huge structures—think of the 3.2-km-long SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Stanford, California. But scientists have been hard at work trying to shrink these ...

Whether it is determining the origin of pollutants, characterizing contaminants in food, imaging individual biological cells or putting a date to historical objects, scientists use ion beams to help ...