Challenging the neutrino signal anomaly
A gentle reminder before we begin: you're allowed to be interested in particle physics. 😉 Neutrinos are among the most mysterious particles in physics. They are extremely light, electrically neu…
Standard Model
12 posts
US experiments find hint of a break in the laws of physics
At 9 pm India time on April 7, physicists at an American research facility delivered a shot in the arm to efforts to find flaws in a powerful theory that explains how the building blocks of the univer…
Physics Nobel rewards neutrino work, but has sting in the tail for India
As neutrino astronomy comes of age, the Nobel Foundation has decided to award Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald with the physics prize for 2015 for their discovery of neutrino oscillations – a pro…
A new particle to break the Standard Model?
The Wire July 2, 2015 Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider particle-smasher have unearthed data from an experiment conducted in 2012 that shows signs of a new particle. If confirmed, its discovery…
The hunt for supersymmetry: Reviewing the first run - 2
I'd linked to a preprint paper [PDF] on arXiv a couple days ago that had summarized the search for Supersymmetry (Susy) from the first run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I'd written to on…
The hunt for supersymmetry: Reviewing the first run
What do dark matter, Higgs bosons, the electron dipole moment, topological superconductors and quantum loops have in common? These are exotic entities that scientists have been using to solve some lon…
The hunt for supersymmetry: Is a choke on the cards?
As scientists have progressed by leaps and bounds in making discoveries and confirming new ideas, they have been disappointed by how one of their favorite theories has been unable to post a positive status update in... years.…
Another window on ‘new physics’ closes
The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that has been pieced together over the last 40 years after careful experiments. It accurately predicts the behaviour of various subatomic particles a…
Where's all the antimatter? New CERN results show the way.
If you look outside your window at the clouds, the stars, the planets, all that you will see is made of matter. However, when the universe was born, there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter.…
Where does the Higgs boson come from?
When the Chelyabinsk meteor – dubbed Chebarkul – entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 17 km/s, it started to heat up due to friction. After a point, cracks already present on the chunk of rock weighin…
Window for an advanced theory of particles closes further
A version of this article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on November 22, 2012. -- On November 12, at the first day of the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium at Kyoto, Japan, researchers pre…
The philosophies in physics
As a big week for physics comes up–a July 4 update by CERN on the search for the Higgs boson followed by ICHEP '12 at Melbourne–I feel really anxious as a small-time proto-journalist and particle-…