Read article 'Theorists calculate the route to carbon-12'
The triple-alpha reaction rate that produces carbon-12 in stars and other energetic astronomical phenomena has been a tricky subject for nuclear theorists for some time.
Read article 'Closer to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole'
Astronomers have been tracking the motion of stars at the very centre of the Galaxy for the past 20 years. One star in particular has attracted a great deal of attention by completing a full orbi...
Read article 'Deflector shields protect the lunar surface'
The origin of the enigmatic "lunar swirls" – patches of relatively pale lunar soil, some measuring several tens of kilometres across – has been an unresolved mystery since the mid-1960s, when NASA...
Read article 'Baryon oscillation spectra for all'
By professional astronomy standards, the 2.5 m telescope at Apache Point Observatory is quite small. More than 50 research telescopes are larger and many are located at much better sites.
Read article 'Summer running at the LHC'
The LHC has delivered more than twice as many collisions to the ATLAS and CMS experiments this year as it did in all of 2011.
Read article 'Illuminating extra dimensions with photons'
Photons are a critical tool at the LHC, and the ATLAS detector has been carefully designed to measure photons precisely.
Read article 'Can heavy-ion collisions cast light on strong CP?'
The symmetries of parity (P) and its combination with charge conjugation (C) are known to be broken in the weak interaction.
Read article 'Searching for new physics in rare kaon-decays'
The LHCb experiment was originally conceived of to study particles containing the beauty-flavoured b quark.
Read article 'The search for ‘big news’ continues'
The big news this summer was on the new Higgs-like boson and how the hint of an excess in last year’s 7 TeV data from the LHC became an observation with this year’s 8 TeV data.
Read article 'BELLA laser achieves 1PW at 1 pulse a second'
The laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) has achieved a world record for laser performance by delivering 1 PW of power in a 1 Hz pulse only 40 fs long.
