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Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics

How tabletop experiments could find evidence of new particles, offering a glimpse beyond the standard model.
  1. Gabriel Popkin

    1. Gabriel Popkin is a freelance journalist based in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

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Gerald Gabrielse tunes a laser at his lab, with postdoc Wayne Huang in background.

Gerald Gabrielse tunes a laser in his low-energy-physics lab at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, with postdoc Wayne Huang. Credit: Alyssa Schukar for Nature.

It’s possible that no one knows the electron as well as physicist Gerald Gabrielse. He once held one in a trap for ten months to measure the size of its internal magnet. When it disappeared, he searched for two days before accepting that it was gone. “You get kind of fond of your particles after a while,” he says.

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Nature 553, 142-144 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00106-5

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