Oliver James of DNEG, which produced the striking black hole in the film Interstellar, describes the science behind visual effects and the challenges in this fast-growing industry. Gargantua A variant ...

Louis Lyons traces the origins of the “five sigma” criterion in particle physics, and asks whether it remains a relevant marker for claiming the discovery of new physics. Disentanglement A Jackson ...

The Courier matched photos from CERN’s first 25 years to current experts and asked them to reflect on how much has changed across 70 years of science. The past seven decades have seen remarkable ...

André de Gouvêa explains why neutrino masses imply the existence of new fundamental fields. Misfits Massive neutrinos are not part of the Standard Model. Credit: Symmetry After all these years, ...

Patrick Koppenburg and Marco Pappagallo survey the 23 exotic hadrons discovered at the LHC so far. Twenty-three exotic states Five pentaquarks and 18 tetraquarks have been discovered so far at the LHC ...

Before the discovery of quarks, Nicola Cabibbo arrived at the correct formulation of the mechanism responsible for quark mixing. Luciano Maiani, Guido Martinelli and Giorgio Parisi recount Cabibbo’s ...

It came as quite a surprise because as far as I know, none of the people who have been honoured with the Breakthrough Prize had already received the Nobel Prize. Of course nothing compares with the ...

A 100 km tunnel hosting a circular electron–positron collider as a first stage towards a 100 TeV proton–proton collider would probe new phenomena coupled to the Higgs and electroweak sectors with ...

Alexander Lenz argues that the charm quark is an experimental and theoretical enigma that has the potential to shed light on the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe. Threading the needle The ...

The development at CERN of magnesium diboride cables and other advanced superconducting systems for the High-Luminosity LHC is also driving applications beyond fundamental research, describes Amalia ...

Detecting and exploring a stochastic background of gravitational waves predicted to pervade the universe potentially opens a window on the extreme physics of the very early universe. Azadeh Maleknejad ...

Significant technology development is required to establish the feasibility of a muon collider. Mastering it, says Mark Palmer, offers an alternative path to the next energy frontier. The physics ...