Sitting in a restaurant, you reach for the ketchup bottle, eyeing the basket of fries in front of you. You give the bottle a ...

Seven years ago, a huge magnet was transported over 3,200 miles (5,150km) across land and sea, in the hope of studying a subatomic particle called a muon. Muons are closely related to electrons, which ...

The strange behaviour of a fundamental particle called a muon may hint at the existence of exotic particles and forces beyond the standard model of physics. We have had signs of this anomaly before, ...

Readers of this paper will probably need no reminder that most of the universe is missing. The atoms and light you see—from people to planets, stars and galaxies—make up just 5% of the universe. The ...

After leaving the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) physics laboratory years ago, I crossed the Swiss-German border by high-speed train. Looking out the window of the carriage, I was ...

Breaking the rules is exciting, especially if they have held for a long time. This is true not just in life but also in particle physics. Here the rule I'm thinking of is called “lepton flavor ...

A clever mathematical tool known as virtual particles unlocks the strange and mysterious inner workings of subatomic particles. What happens to these particles within atoms would stay unexplained ...