Experimental particle physics articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Questioning the validity of axioms can teach us about physics beyond the standard model. A recent search for the violation of charge conservation and the Pauli exclusion principle yields limits on these scenarios.

    • Alessio Porcelli

  • Research Briefing |

    Using ‘momentum cooling’ in cyclotron-based proton therapy can increase proton transmission rates and thereby reduce treatment delivery times. This simple technique, which reduces the momentum spread of the proton beam without introducing substantial beam losses, enhances efficiency and has the potential to reduce costs, thereby advancing cancer treatment and improving patient outcomes.

  • News & Views |

    Ten years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS Collaboration probes its underlying mechanism, the electroweak symmetry breaking, by measuring the scattering of Z bosons, one of the mediators of the weak interactions.

    • Pietro Govoni
    •  & Andrea Massironi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

    • G. Aad
    • , B. Abbott
    •  & L. Zwalinski

  • News & Views |

    In proton–proton collisions, the CMS Collaboration measures the simultaneous production of three particles, each consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark, which yields insights into how the proton’s constituents interact.

    • Jonathan Gaunt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The CMS Collaboration reports the study of three simultaneous hard interactions between quarks and gluons in proton–proton collisions. This manifests through the concurrent production of three J/ψ mesons, which consist of a charm-quark–antiquark pair.

    • A. Tumasyan
    • , W. Adam
    •  & W. Vetens

  • News & Views |

    A potential observation of low-energy antihelium-3 nuclei would have profound impacts on our understanding of the Galaxy. Experiments at particle colliders help us understand how cosmic antimatter travels over long distances before reaching Earth.

    • Aihong Tang

  • News & Views |

    Lorentz symmetry violations might produce anomalies in the propagation of particles travelling through the Universe. The IceCube Collaboration performed the most precise search for such an effect with neutrinos, finding no sign of anomalous behaviour.

    • Giulia Gubitosi

  • News & Views |

    The CMS Collaboration finds evidence for the contribution from off-shell Higgs bosons to the production of events with two Z bosons. This provides a measurement of the Higgs boson’s width.

    • Thomas R. Junk

  • Research Briefing |

    The spatiotemporal profile of the electric field around a high-energy electron beam was visualized using an ultrafast technique based on electro-optic sampling. By investigating the formation of the Coulomb field it was possible to experimentally confirm the validity of the predictions of special relativity regarding electromagnetic fields.

  • Editorial |

    We celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson — a whopping 48 years after its prediction.

  • Comment |

    As we celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, CERN’s Director-General at that time reminisces about the years leading up to this milestone.

    • Rolf-Dieter Heuer

  • News & Views |

    The hunt for new particles helps to complete our understanding of hadronic matter. The LHCb Collaboration now reports the surprising observation of a doubly charmed tetraquark.

    • Zhiqing Liu

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The LHCb Collaboration reports the observation of an exotic, narrow, tetraquark state that contains two charm quarks, an up antiquark and a down antiquark.

    • R. Aaij
    • , A. S. W. Abdelmotteleb
    •  & G. Zunica

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Large Hadron Collider beauty collaboration reports a test of lepton flavour universality in decays of bottom mesons into strange mesons and a charged lepton pair, finding evidence of a violation of this principle postulated in the standard model.

    • R. Aaij
    • , C. Abellán Beteta
    •  & G. Zunica

  • News & Views |

    Although the mass of the electron antineutrino is still eluding direct measurement, the KATRIN experiment with its huge spectrometer has pushed the sensitivity below a billionth of the proton mass.

    • Angelo Nucciotti

  • News & Views |

    Precise measurements of the annihilation of an electron–positron pair into a neutron–antineutron pair allow us to take a look inside the neutron to better understand its complex structure.

    • Galina Pakhlova

  • Letter |

    Form factors encode the structure of nucleons. Measurements from electron–positron annihilation at BESIII reveal an oscillating behaviour of the neutron electromagnetic form factor, and clarify a long-standing photon–nucleon interaction puzzle.

    • M. Ablikim
    • , M. N. Achasov
    •  & J. H. Zou

  • News & Views |

    The ATLAS Collaboration has confirmed with top quark events that the coupling of charged leptons to the weak interaction is universal — showcasing the feasibility of performing high-precision electroweak measurements at proton–proton colliders.

    • Florencia Canelli
    •  & Benjamin Kilminster

  • News & Views |

    Recent measurements of observables related to proton and neutron spin properties at low energies are in disagreement with the available theoretical predictions, and continue to challenge nuclear experimentalists and theorists alike.

    • Mohammad W. Ahmed

  • Editorial |

    The recent measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment increases the tension with predictions from theory. Or does it?

  • Article |

    Measurements of the proton’s spin structure in experiments scattering a polarized electron beam off polarized protons in regions of low momentum transfer squared test predictions from chiral effective field theory of the strong interaction.

    • X. Zheng
    • , A. Deur
    •  & Z. W. Zhao

  • Comment |

    Muon colliders offer enormous potential for the exploration of the particle physics frontier but are challenging to realize. A new international collaboration is forming to make such a muon collider a reality.

    • K. R. Long
    • , D. Lucchesi
    •  & V. Shiltsev

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The Future Circular Colliders are proposed as a future step after the Large Hadron Collider has stopped running. The first stage foresees collision of electron–positron pairs before a machine upgrade to allow proton–proton operation.

    • Michael Benedikt
    • , Alain Blondel
    •  & Frank Zimmermann

  • Perspective |

    Proposals for the particle physics programmes in the United States and Asia are discussed; mainly the International Linear Collider in Japan, the Circular Electron–Positron Collider in China and accelerator-based long-baseline neutrino experiments in the United States.

    • Pushpalatha C. Bhat
    •  & Geoffrey N. Taylor

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The Compact Linear Collider is a proposed high-luminosity electron–positron collider that can reach TeV-scale energies. Its accelerator design and physics programme, mainly focusing on precision measurements and new physics searches, are discussed.

    • Eva Sicking
    •  & Rickard Ström

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Within the Physics Beyond Collider programme, complementary methods to high-energy frontier particle colliders to investigate the physics of elementary particles and their interactions are studied.

    • Joerg Jaeckel
    • , Mike Lamont
    •  & Claude Vallée

  • Article |

    The internal structure of the neutron has now been probed by highly energetic photons scattering off it. Combined with previous results for protons, these measurements reveal the contributions of quark flavours to the nucleon structure.

    • M. Benali
    • , C. Desnault
    •  & P. Zhu

  • Letter |

    Electron bunches are generated and accelerated to relativistic velocities by tunnel ionization of neutral gas species in a plasma. This represents a step towards ultra-bright, high-emittance beams in plasma wakefield accelerators. [This summary has been amended from ‘laser-plasma’ to ‘plasma wakefield’ accelerators.]

    • A. Deng
    • , O. S. Karger
    •  & B. Hidding

  • News & Views |

    The visible mass in the Universe emerged when hadrons — the building blocks of atomic nuclei — formed from a hot fireball made of quarks and gluons. This mechanism has now been investigated in baryon-rich matter at relatively low temperatures.

    • Ralf Rapp

  • Article |

    Virtual photons emitted from strong-interaction matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions decay into electron–positron pairs, which provide information about the system’s properties.

    • J. Adamczewski-Musch
    • , O. Arnold
    •  & P. Zumbruch

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