Can the discovery of the Higgs boson particle help with time travel?,” asked a young Vernon Area Public Library patron who attended the Science Explorers program. Quarks, leptons and bosons are ...

Particle physics is difficult. It takes years of study in order to truly grasp it. Moreover, there is still a lot that even the most experienced experts don’t understand (a whole lot, in fact). And ...

The giant Large Hadron Collider at CERN's lab in Europe may be closed until 2015 but experiments will still be run there in the second half of this year on much smaller synchrotrons that examined the ...

The quarks, antiquarks, and gluons of the standard model have a color charge, in addition to all the other properties like mass and electric charge that other particles and antiparticles possess. All ...

The particles that are in an atom: protons, neutrons and electrons The particles that are in protons and neutrons: quarks The four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and ...

Physicists propose there may be a new stage for some dying stars. Dubbed electroweak stars, they are fueled by the conversion of quarks to leptons, which prevents or staves off collapse into a black ...

Building experimental evidence suggests that the electron, muon and tau may feel different forces. When the tau lepton was discovered in the 1970s, it didn’t resolve any outstanding mysteries—it ...

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Bottoms up: physicists working on the ATLAS experiment have discovered the most common Higgs decay channel. (Courtesy: Maximilien Brice/CERN) Physicists working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN have ...

“I was actually shaking,” said Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College, London, as he describes the moment he saw the results. “I realised this was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ...

Quarks and leptons, the building blocks of matter, are staggeringly small. Even the largest quarks are only about an attometer (a billionth of a billionth of a meter) in diameter. But zoom in closer—a ...

Elisabetta Barberio receives funding from the ARC. So what are leptons? First, let’s start with the basics. Matter is made up of atoms, and atoms are made of electrons and nuclei, bound by the ...