Building experimental evidence suggests that the electron, muon and tau may feel different forces. When the tau lepton was discovered in the 1970s, it didn’t resolve any outstanding mysteries—it ...

In the world of particle physics, you are never alone — quite literally. Every moment there is an invisible rainstorm of subatomic particles falling down on us from space. Unlike the kind of matter we ...

Highly energetic: visualization of the light gathered from the 2.6 PeV event in IceCube. The image shows a portion of the vertical strings of photomultipliers that make up the detector array.

The muon—the short-lived cousin of the electron—could be the key to understanding relationships between other fundamental particles. And it holds a mystery all its own. In the 1930s, scientists ...

Imagine waking up one morning to find that your meter stick had shrunk, overnight, by exactly four centimeters. That difference sounds small, yet it is still dramatic enough to thoroughly muck up ...

High-energy physics is facing its greatest crisis ever. The Standard Model is complete, as all the particles our most successful physics theories have predicted have been discovered. The Large Hadron ...

Elisabetta Barberio receives funding from the ARC. So what are leptons? First, let’s start with the basics. Matter is made up of atoms, and atoms are made of electrons and nuclei, bound by the ...

A new measurement by CERN’s ATLAS Collaboration has strengthened evidence that the masses of fundamental particles originate through their interaction with the Higgs field. Building on earlier results ...