Particle accelerators are often framed as exotic machines built only to chase obscure particles, but they are really precision tools that use electric fields and magnets to steer tiny beams of matter ...

In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted gave a demonstration on electricity to a class of advanced students at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Using an early battery prototype, he looked to see what ...

The phenomenon of crystal channeling, whereby charged particles are guided along the interatomic corridors of a crystalline material, continues to yield transformative advances in particle beam ...

At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has powered down for the last time, ending operations at the only particle collider still running in the United ...

Scientists have successfully developed a pocket-sized particle accelerator capable of projecting ultra-short electron beams with laser light at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. To achieve this ...

Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

The famed collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has ended operations, but if all goes to plan, a new collider will rise ...

Laser physicists have built a novel hybrid plasma accelerator. Particle accelerators have become an indispensable tool for studies of the structure of matter at sub-atomic scales, and have important ...

Before the RHIC shut down, it was the only operational particle collider in the U.S. and one of two heavy-ion colliders in the world, the other being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

At the smallest scales of nature, the rules of the world shift in ways that can feel unsettling and beautiful at the same ...

Scientists have succeeded in creating an experimental model of an elusive kind of fundamental particle called a skyrmion in a beam of light. Scientists at the University of Birmingham have succeeded ...