Going underground in search of dark matter strikes

THE chill hits me as soon as the door shuts. Then the floor starts to rumble. The lift I've just entered feels like an original from the late 1800s, when miners made the same trip in search of iron ore. But my guide and I (pictured above) are seeking a much more elusive substance: dark matter.

Pinning down the elusive Majorana fermion

It may not be as famous as the Higgs boson but the Majorana fermion is a fascinating particle that has managed to evade physicists for the best part of a century. In this audio interview the theoretical physicist Carlo Beenakker talks to Physics World about how experimentalists may have finally caught a glimpse of these elusive particles.

Cern discovery points to new model of universe

SCIENTISTS AT Cern may be on the verge of a discovery that will take them towards a new understanding of the evolution of our universe. The finding may also help explain fundamental things about the cosmos that happened just a minute after the Big Bang.

A one-way street for spinning atoms

Elementary particles have a fundamental property called 'spin' that determines how they align in a magnetic field. MIT researchers have created a new physical system in which atoms with clockwise spin move in only one direction, while atoms with counterclockwise spin move in the opposite direction.

Elementary particles have a property called “spin” that can be thought of as rotation around their axes. In work reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT physicists have imposed a stringent set of traffic rules on atomic particles in a gas: Those spinning clockwise can move in only one direction, while those spinning counterclockwise can move only in the other direction.