From targets to absorbers, beam-intercepting devices are vital to CERN’s accelerator complex. Marco Calviani describes the major upgrades taking place to prepare for the high-luminosity LHC, and the ...

Patrick Koppenburg and Marco Pappagallo survey the 23 exotic hadrons discovered at the LHC so far. Twenty-three exotic states Five pentaquarks and 18 tetraquarks have been discovered so far at the LHC ...

Louis Lyons traces the origins of the “five sigma” criterion in particle physics, and asks whether it remains a relevant marker for claiming the discovery of new physics. Disentanglement A Jackson ...

On-chip acceleration pioneers Robert Byer, Joel England, Peter Hommelhoff and Roy Shiloh report on progress to miniaturise accelerators from centimetres to microns. Accelerators on a chip Forty long ...

A major proposed upgrade of the LHCb detector for LHC Runs 5 and 6 would allow a wide range of flavour-physics observables to be explored with extreme precision. Lucia Grillo, Stefano Perazzini and ...

In the summer of 1968, while a visitor in CERN’s theory division, Gabriele Veneziano wrote a paper titled “Construction of a crossing-symmetric, Regge behaved amplitude for linearly-rising ...

Either new particles are keeping the Higgs boson light, or the universe is oddly fine-tuned for our existence. Nathaniel Craig goes down the rabbit hole of the electroweak hierarchy problem.

Jochen Klein and Marco van Leeuwen describe the physics motivation, detector concept and projected performance of a next-generation heavy-ion programme for LHC Runs 5 and 6. Brand new ALICE 3 is built ...

Oliver James of DNEG, which produced the striking black hole in the film Interstellar, describes the science behind visual effects and the challenges in this fast-growing industry. Gargantua A variant ...

André de Gouvêa explains why neutrino masses imply the existence of new fundamental fields. Misfits Massive neutrinos are not part of the Standard Model. Credit: Symmetry After all these years, ...

Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner ask what makes tetraquarks and pentaquarks tick, revealing them to be at times exotic compact states, at times hadronic molecules and at times both – with much still ...

The development at CERN of magnesium diboride cables and other advanced superconducting systems for the High-Luminosity LHC is also driving applications beyond fundamental research, describes Amalia ...