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Do opposites attract? ALPHA-g prepares to explore antimatter gravity

Stuff falls down. This is the universal experience we all have with the gravitational interaction of matter on Earth. Yet one may still wonder if this holds true in the case of the most elusive stuff you can imagine dropping: antimatter. Might it be…

From COMPASS to AMBER: exploring fundamental properties of hadrons

The quest to fully understand the internal structure of hadrons, in particular the dynamics as well as the spatial and momentum distributions of their constituents - the partons -, inspired a large community of theoreticians and experimentalists to…

PUMA: antiprotons to probe the surface of radioactive nuclei

Antiprotons as a probe to study short-lived isotopes remain unexploited despite past pioneering works with stable nuclei. In particular, low-energy antiprotons offer a unique prospect in terms of sensitivity to the neutron and proton densities at…

Secrets of beta decay unraveled at ISOLDE

Ernest Rutherford, in 1899, separated radioactive emissions into two types: alpha and beta. Becquerel, in 1900, measured the mass-to-charge ratio of beta particles and identified them as electrons. The theory of β decay was developed by Fermi in…

MADMAX prototype test at CERN

Axion : A promising Dark Matter candidate For decades astronomical observations have indicated the existence of large quantities of dark matter in the universe. Until today, the nature of dark matter has not been understood and is therefore a…

Closing the gap between beam dump and colliders ALPs searches with NA64

The axion was postulated to provide a solution to the "strong CP" problem. This pseudo-scalar particle emerges as a consequence of the breaking of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry [1,2,3] (link to EP article on Axions). Typically, models of QCD axions…

A mobile antiproton reservoir for precision measurements

The BASE collaboration has performed the most precise measurements of the fundamental properties of the antiproton in order to test CPT invariance as fundamental symmetry of the Standard Model [1, 2] and to search for dark matter-antimatter…

NA62 experiment at CERN reports first evidence for ultra-rare process sensitive to new physics

The CERN NA62 collaboration presented at the ICHEP 2020 conference the first significant experimental evidence for the ultra-rare decay of the charged kaon into a charged pion and two neutrinos (K+ -> π+νν). The decay process is very sensitive to…

Pinpointing the structure of the SnV centre in diamond using emission channelling at ISOLDE

Diamond – beyond its allure as a jewel – exhibits an array of unique physical characteristics such as its hardness, the highest room thermal conductivity of any material (while being electrically insulating when undoped); it can also be doped to…

CLOUD experiment makes its own clouds to study

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes aerosols (small nanometer to micrometer sized particles suspended in air) as the single biggest source of uncertainty in human-driven climate change. Atmospheric aerosol particles are…

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