Articles & Interviews
27/09/2024The second most important concept in physics is symmetry. The most important one is how to break them. Symmetries are the guiding principles for building theories. For instance, all astrophysical objects are spherical. This means that gravity has no favourite direction in space; left-right or up-down is the same for gravity. Hence, when we study gravity, we consider it to have rotational symmetry, where all points on a sphere are equally attracted. Similarly, this happens for other forces! Electromagnetism exhibits conservation of charge: all processes in nature preserve that the electric charge at the beginning is the same as at the end, and whatever happens in the middle will not change this fact. So, all the theories that physicists come up with need to take this experimental observation into account.
29/11/2023Predicted long time ago by the Einstein theory of General Relativity, gravitational waves constitute today one the most promising field of modern physics. Only produced by the most violent events of the universe, like mergers of black holes or neutron stars, they have shed light on the intrinsic properties of those objects. Furthermore, the gravitational waves have the potential to reveal the first instant of the universe, dark matter or again dark energy. For these reasons, they have opened a totally new window on our way to observe and understand the universe. In line with that, tremendous efforts are currently spent in order to build efficient telescopes or other gravitational wave detectors. In this article, we recall the main properties of gravitational waves, as proposed initially by Albert Einstein, we then present the recent signals of gravitational waves observed in the currently running experiments. Finally, the futur prospects are discussed.
25/10/2023Billions of years ago, the Universe we are living in might have looked very different than it does today. In fact there are hints in recent data that the Universe went through a very chaotic and disruptive time. The Universe might have been boiling. But to understand where this hypothesis comes from and how scientists believe they can observe the effects of this boiling we need to take a step back and tell the story of Penzian and Wilson.
04/10/2023The desire of humans to classify and organize things according to a few simple laws is something deep in our culture and it is something that we have done since 2500 years.
11/09/2023What is matter made of? There are some questions that human beings have tried to answer since the beginning of their history: Why are we there? What is the Universe? What is the meaning of life?... One of these compelling questions is: What is matter made of? What are we made of? Throughout history, scientists and philosophers have proposed different explanations, such as the possibility that everything we observe in nature is made of four basic elements (fire, air, water and earth). In the 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus was the first to suggest the idea that every kind of matter (a stone, a human being, an animal, a flower…) is composed of tiny, unbreakable and elementary building blocks that he called atoms.
07/02/2022"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate!' ('Abandon all hope, you who enter!’) are the words written above the entrance of Hell in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. This iconic line from Italian literature resonates in my head when I think about the task of studying Nature. As hope must be abandoned by the damned because it will only cause great pain since it will never be satisfied, so too must physicists abandon something precious and intrinsic to every living thing when they begin to study Nature: bias. In fact, despite the fact that the study of Nature started from what we can perceive with our senses, over the centuries it has proved increasingly "counterintuitive", revealing phenomena inconceivable to the very same senses, challenging and ultimately surpassing our imagination. How is it possible that scientific research can go on despite this? How can physicists appreciate and study the unimaginable? Above all, how can we trust what we cannot see? These questions are the lighthouse of our journey through some of the most curious phenomena that Nature can offer us.
20/10/2021Paper of the month: Accumulating Evidence for the Associate Production of a Neutral Scalar with Mass around 151 GeV
23/03/2021Paper of the month: Directionality preservation of nuclear recoils in an emulsion detector for directional dark matter search
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