P. Wang

When a particle decays, it doesn't just vanish: it transforms into a whole set of other particles, and each transformation has its own script. Physicists from the BESIII collaboration have, for the first time, broken down the rare decay of the D0 meson step by step: it turns into two kaons and two pions.

LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors act like giant microphones, listening in on gravitational waves — vibrations of space itself. The new GWTC-5.0 catalog recorded 161 black hole mergers, bringing the total count to 390 events.

Imagine a giant inflatable balloon with galaxies painted on it. As it inflates, the pattern stretches and neighboring dots move apart. The rate of that stretching is the Hubble constant. Astronomers usually catch light from distant stars and see how much it has reddened due to the stretching of space.

A huge bowl of water. Drop a stone into it — ripples spread across the surface. The fabric of spacetime works much the same way: when two massive stars merge, they create ripples — gravitational waves. These waves travel to Earth and are picked up by giant detectors like LIGO and Virgo.

Gravitational-wave detectors are like extremely sensitive ears: they pick up the trembling of space when black holes or neutron stars collide somewhere in the universe. But even the most sophisticated "ears" cannot hear everything. The new LIGO A# project is like replacing the eardrum with a thinner, more sensitive membrane.

An archaeologist carefully brushes away layer after layer, and each new stratum at the charmonium dig is a rare decay captured by the detector. Charmonium — a bound state of a charm quark and its antiquark — lives for mere fractions of a second, yet it manages to tell us about the forces that hold quarks together.

A chef prepares a delicate dish where every grain must be in its place. A single stray crumb of an unwanted ingredient can overpower the subtle flavor of the main product. In much the same way, physicists studying the fusion of oxygen nuclei struggle with impurities in their targets. The reaction in which two oxygen-16 nuclei fuse determines the late stages of massive stars.