Scientists spend a lot of time ordering things: laboratory equipment, samples and consumables. What if a researcher’s to-do list included ordering an antimatter delivery? In March, the BASE Collaboration brought that reality one step closer. Writing in Nature, Leonhardt et al. sealed 92 antiprotons in a specialized ultrahigh-vacuum trap, loaded them into a truck and
An image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/IAA, University of Basque Country/JHU It is a single data point, but enough to send a shiver down physicists’ spines. Some time in 2023 or 2024, a detector containing 10 tonnes of ultra-pure
In the very first moments of the universe, matter didn’t exist as we know today. A millionth of a second or so after the big bang, the universe was a dense, hot soup scientists call quark-gluon plasma (QGP). For several years, particle colliders—which smash molecules together at nearly the speed of light—have been able to
Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with thick lead walls and wet sandbags, and placed it near a powerful nuclear reactor at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. They called the experiment Project Poltergeist, designed as it was to catch a ghost. More
