In a vast, dark hall, they're searching for a single person who makes almost no sound. That's how physicists hunt for sterile neutrinos — ghostly particles that pass through matter, leaving barely a trace.
At the Jefferson Lab accelerator, a beam of light strikes protons, and the collisions give birth to short-lived particles — omega mesons. They live for less than a billionth of a second, but they still manage to tell us about the forces inside the atomic nucleus.