atlas detector

The antiproton beam hits the plate, and each impact bursts into a shower of charged particles. In the GBAR experiment at CERN, this picture is captured not by a sophisticated detector but by an ordinary industrial camera without a lens, pressed against the vacuum window from the outside.

A regular radar is like a microphone in a buzzing crowd: individual sounds blend into mush. PiVoT works like a conductor who instantly recognizes each instrument in the tuning chaos. Instead of shuffling through hypotheses, the algorithm tightens a loop around the most likely targets — cars, cyclists, pedestrians.

3I/ATLAS burst into the Solar System like an uninvited guest, a gift of fate for hunters of extraterrestrial intelligence. This comet-like wanderer from the depths of the Galaxy flew close enough to be heard in all its details — unlike distant exoplanets.

A hundred people are talking at once in a large hall. You try to hear one, but voices blend, some whisper, and you don't even suspect the existence of others. That's roughly how a conventional laser gas analyzer feels when dozens of substances mix in a combustion chamber or a factory pipe.

At the Large Hadron Collider, protons collide, and from the flash dozens of particles are born. Among them may be traces of rare processes — for example, the decay of a Standard Model Higgs boson into two W bosons. But these particles fly apart so quickly that their tracks merge into a single wide jet.

Cosmic rays are particles that arrive from deep space. When such a particle hits the atmosphere, it triggers a whole shower of new particles, like a billiard ball breaking a rack, sending balls scattering in all directions. To predict what such a shower will look like, we need to know how the primary particle interacts with the nuclei of air atoms.

At the Large Hadron Collider, protons collide at nearly the speed of light. Sometimes they don't smash apart but exchange photons — particles of light. These photons can produce a pair: one particle the detector sees, and another that flies off unnoticed.

In 2017, protons at the Large Hadron Collider collided with an energy of 5.02 TeV. The CMS detector recorded these collisions, and among billions of events, physicists hunted for a rare occurrence: the production of a single top quark without its antiparticle.

In turbulent air, droplets don't fly in straight lines: they get tossed around like dust motes in a beam of light. Physicists have built a setup that tracks each droplet, which is about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair. A camera captures their motion, and a computer reconstructs their trajectories.

The distant galaxy TXS 2005+403, located in the constellation Cygnus, behaves like a lighthouse whose beam shines through fog. Light from its active nucleus, a region where a supermassive black hole heats infalling matter, crosses clouds of charged gas in our Galaxy on its way to us.

In the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, protons collide billions of times per second. From this stream, physicists fished out eight events in which the collision produced two Z particles and one photon.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider, protons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and smashed head-on. At the collision point, a burst of energy is born for an instant, from which new particles can emerge. One of the heaviest is the top quark.

In a collider detector, each proton collision leaves a trail of dozens of particles, like the splash from a stone thrown into water. Making sense of that splash and understanding what exactly happened at the moment of impact is a task that humans can no longer handle alone.

A pebble drops into a pond, and ripples spread across the water. But sometimes the pebble doesn't sink right away: it skims beneath the surface, travels a few meters, and only then surfaces, creating ripples in an unexpected spot.

Two spinning tops are set off simultaneously in opposite directions. If one spins left, the other always spins right — no matter how far apart they fly. That's roughly how quantum entanglement works, except instead of tops, we have top quarks, the heaviest known particles.

Inside protons accelerated to nearly the speed of light, a particle heavier than a gold atom is sometimes born — the top quark. It lives for tiny fractions of a second and decays, leaving a trace in the ATLAS detector. Physicists collected such traces for four years to understand how often the top quark and its mirror twin, the antiquark, appear.

Measuring a particle’s energy at the Large Hadron Collider is like trying to catch a whisper in a roaring crowd. When protons collide, a flurry of particles is born, their signals blending into a cacophony. Old-school methods, like a noise-clogged ear, systematically underestimate the energy. Scientists built a neural network that works right inside the detector.