Cern has published its ideas for a £20bn successor to the Large Hadron Collider, given the working name of Future Circular Collider (FCC). The Geneva based particle physics research centre is proposing an accelerator that is almost four times longer and ten times more powerful. The aim is to have the FCC hunting for new sub-atomic particles by 2050. Critics say that the money could be better spent on other research areas such as combating climate change.

What is the shape of an electron? If you recall pictures from your high school science books, the answer seems quite clear: an electron is a small ball of negative charge that is smaller than an atom. This, however, is quite far from the truth.

Physicists detail how “Ice VII” forms for the first time and what this means for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

Scientists this week released a conceptual design report for a next-generation particle accelerator in China, which would serve as a “Higgs boson factory,” as its proponents have called it.

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet. Particles took their last spin around the Large Hadron Collider on December 3 before scientists shut the machine down for two years of upgrades. Located at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, the accelerator has smashed together approximately 16 million billion protons since 2015, when it reached its current energy of 13 trillion electron volts. Planned improvements before the machine restarts in 2021 will bring the energy up to 14 trillion electron volts — the energy it was originally designed to reach.

Some say bigger is better, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will tell you that when it comes to tech, smaller things are far more impressive. This month, MIT researchers announced they invented a way to shrink objects to nanoscale -- smaller than what you can see with a microscope -- using a laser. That means they can take any simple structure and reduce it to one 1,000th of its original size.

Scientists have created a long-sought particle in the lab by hitting a crystal lattice with photons.

The Standard Model is a kind of periodic table of the elements for particle physics. But instead of listing the chemical elements, it lists the fundamental particles that make up the atoms that make up the chemical elements, along with any other particles that cannot be broken down into any smaller pieces.

On 3 June this year, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN began delivering particle collisions at an energy 63% higher than previously acheived. This week in Vienna, first physics results were presented. Here are some highlights.

The NOvA detector has seen its first neutrino oscillations.

Researchers pushing the Large Hadron Collider to its limits say engineering difficulties will cut short the amount of physics data gathered this year.

Physicists search for deviations from normal gravity

Accelerating positrons with plasma is a step toward smaller, cheaper particle colliders.

Subatomic particles have been found that appear to defy the Standard Model of particle physics. The team working at Cern's Large Hadron Collider have found evidence of leptons decaying at different rates, which could possibly point to some undiscovered forces. Publishing their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team from the University of Maryland had been searching for conditions and behaviours that do not fit with the Standard Model.

First results from collisions of three-particle ions with gold nuclei reveal clear-cut evidence of primordial soup's signature particle flow.

The neutrino and its antimatter cousin, the antineutrino, are the tiniest subatomic particles known to science. These particles are byproducts of nuclear reactions within stars (including our sun), supernovae, black holes and human-made nuclear reactors. They also result from radioactive decay processes deep within the Earth, where radioactive heat and the heat left over from the planet's formation fuels plate tectonics, volcanoes and Earth's magnetic field.

A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen.

The LHC and the Belle experiment have found particle decay patterns that violate the Standard Model of particle physics

As new data continue to be collected at CERN, another look at some of the straws in the wind, otherwise known as “hints of new physics”, that might develop into exciting breakthroughs

An emerging theory takes principles from quantum physics and applies them to psychology.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have “teleported” or transferred quantum information carried in light particles over 100 kilometers (km) of optical fiber, four times farther than the previous record.

It’s been more than three years since we’ve found the Higgs boson. So how does it give particles mass?

The most powerful accelerator in the world found the Higgs, but might not find anything else. What should come next?

Machines that ‘surf’ particles on electric fields could reach high energies at a lower price.

A team of scientists have made what may turn out to be the most important discovery in history – how the universe came into being from nothing. The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle. And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.

A new study offers some reassurance. By Michael Byrne.

His Holiness on emptiness and entanglement.

Other universes might be bumping into ours, and these bumps are leaving their mark.

The kind of research being conducted at CERN is a reminder of what we can accomplish, together, even amid the darkest of times, says physicist Marcelo Gleiser.

In the beginning, there was a question mark. All else followed. The end. We've all heard of the Big Bang theory (I'm talking about the cosmological model, not the TV show), but it's important to understand what that theory is and what it's not. Let me take this opportunity to be precisely, abundantly, emphatically, ridiculously, fantastically clear: The Big Bang theory is not a theory of the creation of the universe. Full stop. Done. Call it. Burn that sentence into your brain. Say it before y

Classically, light can be thought of in two ways: either as a particle or a wave. But what is it really? Well, the ‘observer effect’ makes that question kind of difficult to answer. So before we get too far into it, what is the observer effect?

Researchers have developed a system that uses an electric shockwave to extract salt and other impurities out of salty or contaminated water, and say it could be scaled up for use in desalination or water purification plants, or be used to clean the vast amounts of dirty water produced by fracking. Known as 'shock electrodialysis', the technique applies an electrically driven shockwave to a constant stream of flowing water. The current interacts with the charged salt particles...

Scientists don’t yet know what dark matter is made of, but they are full of ideas. By Laura Dattaro.

A controversial experiment at Fermilab designed to hunt for signs that our universe may really be a hologram has failed to find the evidence it was seeking, the laboratory has announced. It’s called the Holometer (short for “Holographic Interferometer”), and it’s the brainchild of Fermilab physicist Craig Hogan. He dreamed up the idea in 2009 as a way to test the so-called holographic principle.

The probability that the Universe exists in a stable state may be greater than previously thought.