From detecting the ripples of colliding black holes to imaging individual chemical bonds, mechanical transducers have ...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun its first-ever collisions of oxygen ions, in the latest attempt to understand the early universe. The LHC is largely famous for its proton-proton collisions, ...

An innovative algorithm for detecting collisions of high-speed particles within nuclear fusion reactors has been developed, inspired by technologies used to determine whether bullets hit targets in ...

Particles known as tensor mesons are created when high-energy photons interact. These mesons have now been proposed to have a larger effect on photon behavior than previously thought, and provide a ...

But thunderclouds present a more perplexing puzzle. Here, both colliding particles are fundamentally the same material: frozen water. A delicate ice crystal hitting rough graupel should be like ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She ...

Artist’s depiction of a proton’s interior. In quantum chromodynamics, the constituent quarks come in three “colors,” along with up and down “flavors.” Also shown are virtual quark-antiquark pairs and ...

A suborbital experiment indicates that centimetre-sized clusters of tribocharged submillimetre grains resist erosion by individual grains with collision speeds up to around 0.5 m s –1. The stability ...

A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny ...