N. Severijns

Catching a whisper in the middle of a noisy train station: that's roughly the challenge facing physicists searching for the neutron's electric dipole moment. This is a tiny shift of charge inside the particle. If it exists, it breaks the symmetry between matter and antimatter and could explain why our world exists at all.

A charged particle beam is like a jet of water from a hose: it can be narrow or diffuse, steady or curved. To know exactly where particles are headed, you need a sensitive screen. In the WISArD experiment at ISOLDE, CERN's accelerator, that screen is a compact detector based on microchannel plates.