Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current ...

Most of the matter in the universe may be made out of particles that possess an unusual, donut-shaped electromagnetic field called an anapole. This proposal, which endows dark matter particles with a ...

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

The universe’s first moments after the Big Bang were strange beyond imagination. Now physicists have discovered they may have been even weirder than we thought, dominated by enormous, twisted knots of ...

For various, typically historical reasons, even the best physicists claim things that sound egregious to modern observers. That doesn’t necessarily mean these ideas are completely useless—if anything, ...

Scientists at Fermilab’s MicroBooNE experiment have ruled out the existence of the elusive sterile neutrino, a particle proposed for decades to explain puzzling neutrino behavior. Their high-precision ...

Physicists have spent decades treating mass as something the universe simply hands to particles, a property encoded in equations rather than explained from first principles. A new proposal argues that ...

The universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, where matter significantly outweighs antimatter despite their theoretically equal creation at the Big Bang, remains a major unsolved problem in physics.

Crucially, physicists haven’t been able to think of any such process that would mesh with today’s leading theory of matter and energy, known as the Standard Model of particle physics. That leaves ...