Explainer
Why Nobody Has Ever Seen a Free Quark
Take a proton and try to pull one of its quarks out. The force resisting you does not weaken with distance the way gravity or electricity does. It stays roughly…
Topic
Particle Physics
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Analysis
The Best Evidence Yet for a Glueball Is a Decay That Never Happens
On 5 August 2026, at a plenary session of the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil, the BESIII collaboration told the field that the lightest pseudoscalar glueball dominates…
Research
The Nuclear Reaction That Wasn’t Breaking the Stardust Models
The first ever measurement of neutron capture on niobium-94 came back close to the theoretical estimate it replaced. That is the key finding. For two decades, stellar models struggled to…
Research
Oxygen and Neon Collisions Reveal New Evidence of Quark-Gluon Plasma at the LHC
Two oxygen nuclei carry sixteen protons and neutrons apiece. Smash them together and the jets that come out lose energy on the way, which means something hot and dense sat…
Analysis
Watching Mass Form in Real Time: How Quantum Chips Are Simulating Particle Physics
Between early 2025 and mid-2026, quantum processors have gone from simulating toy models of particle physics to watching confinement, string breaking, and hadron scattering play out in real time. These…
Analysis
The fourth neutrino was excluded at 99.99%. The anomalies are still there.
A fourth neutrino that feels no weak force explained thirty years of anomalies. MicroBooNE excluded it at 95% confidence and KATRIN found no kink in 36 million electrons. The eV-scale…
Research
Six antineutrinos a day, measured from a reactor that had been switched off for weeks
A pressurised water reactor that has been offline for three weeks still sends about six antineutrino events a day into a detector 400 metres away. Double Chooz has measured that…
Research
A particle made of nothing but force
Gluons pull on each other, so they should be able to bind into a particle with no quarks at all. BESIII says X(2370) is dominated by one. The measurements are…
Research
JUNO beat every previous measurement in 59 days. Its real target is still years away.
The commissioning paper reports 1785 photoelectrons per MeV, 20.6 m scintillator transparency and uranium below 10⁻¹⁶ g/g. The first physics paper reports the world's best solar oscillation parameters from 59.1…
Explainer
Nineteen numbers, seventeen particles, one theory that will not break
The theory rests on nineteen numbers no one can derive from anything deeper, and it has survived every test aimed at it, including the two anomalies that were supposed to…
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