Read article 'Hubble reveals earliest galaxies'
Although the Hubble Space Telescope is more than 22 years old, the regular upgrade of its instruments preserves intact its discovery potential as time goes by. Now, its quest to detect the most d...
Read article 'ALICE takes new directions in charm-suppression studies'
Using data from the second high-statistics lead–lead (PbPb) run of the LHC, which took place in 2011, the ALICE experiment is taking new directions in studying the interaction of charm quarks wi...
Read article 'De-squeezed beams for ALFA and TOTEM'
Following tests in September, a short, dedicated run at the end of October provided "de-squeezed" beams to the ALFA and TOTEM experiments, allowing new measurements of the elastic proton–proton cros...
Read article 'The Republic of Cyprus becomes CERN associate member state'
On 5 October, CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, and the minister of education and culture of the Republic of Cyprus, George Demosthenous, signed an agreement under which the Republic of Cyprus wi...
Read article 'First results from proton–lead colliding beams'
On 12 September, during a short, highly successful pilot run, the LHC operated with protons in one beam and lead ions in the other, so providing the LHC experiments with their first proton–nucleus ...
Read article 'Measurement of photons stimulates quest for QGP temperature'
One of the classic signals expected for a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) is the radiation of "thermal photons", with a spectrum reflecting the temperature of the system.
Read article 'Leptons on the trail of the unexpected'
Searches in LHC data that do not depend on specific theoretical models provide a valuable complement to optimized, model-dependent searches because they have the capacity to uncover hints of the compl...
Read article 'CMS homes in on the heaviest quark'
The top quark is the heaviest point-like particle known. It weighs about as much as an atom of tungsten yet is an elementary building block of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Read article 'LHCb reports first 5σ observation of charm mixing'
The large cross-section for charm production at the LHC, and the geometry and instrumentation of the LHCb detector, provide samples of charmed hadrons far larger than those accumulated by previous exp...
Read article 'XMM-Newton discovers new source of cosmic rays'
Researchers using the European X-ray astronomy satellite XMM-Newton have discovered a new source of low-energy cosmic rays in the vicinity of the Arches cluster, near the centre of the Milky Way.
