Significant recent advancements spearheaded with support from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are revealing deeper insights into the fundamental nature of our universe.
The ongoing experiments at CERN aim to explore the smallest building blocks of matter and the forces governing them. Unveiling the dynamics of these forces is allowing scientists to inch toward a better fundamental understanding of the universe’s origins, structure, and behavior.
An intergovernmental organization, CERN is home to the largest and most advanced particle physics laboratory found anywhere in the world. It also houses the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer ring comprised of superconducting magnets that researchers working at the facility use to boost the energy of particles, enabling experiments that cannot be achieved anywhere else on Earth and which reveal clues about some of the most intriguing questions physicists have about the nature of matter and energy.
In recent weeks, an ongoing series of achievements made possible by CERN has marked significant strides toward resolving these lingering questions about the cosmos. In April, researchers working at the facility announced a new milestone in measuring the electroweak mixing angle, in new findings that will further refine scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
The achievement, part of an ongoing collaboration with researchers from the University of Rochester and global members of the particle physics community, will help to shed light on the conditions that immediately followed the explosive birth of our universe and shed new insights into the lingering mysteries of particle physics.
Led by University of Rochester experimental particle physicist Arie Bodek, the work was carried out with support from Europe’s premier particle physics laboratory and the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN facility and was part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration.
A key element of the Standard Model, the electroweak mixing angle, also called the Weinberg angle, is used by physicists to describe the relative strength of the electromagnetic and weak forces, as well as how they combine to form the electroweak interaction. Measuring this is helpful in terms of understanding the universe’s fundamental forces and how they work together at extremely small scales, which scientists hope will offer deeper insights into the properties of matter and energy.
Such insights could greatly improve our understanding of the Standard Model, which describes our current best understanding of particle interactions and predicts numerous phenomena in physics and astronomy.
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