{"id":234138,"date":"2026-03-27T03:18:03","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T08:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/near-misses-in-particle-accelerators-can-illuminate-new-physics-study-finds"},"modified":"2026-03-27T03:18:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T08:18:03","slug":"near-misses-in-particle-accelerators-can-illuminate-new-physics-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/near-misses-in-particle-accelerators-can-illuminate-new-physics-study-finds","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Near-misses\u2019 in particle accelerators can illuminate new physics, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/near-misses-in-particle-accelerators-can-illuminate-new-physics-study-finds.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Particle accelerators reveal the heart of nuclear matter by smashing together atoms at close to the speed of light. The high-energy collisions produce a shower of subatomic fragments that scientists can then study to reconstruct the core building blocks of matter.<\/p>\n<p>An MIT-led team has now used the world\u2019s most powerful particle accelerator to discover new properties of matter, through particles\u2019 \u201cnear-misses.\u201d The approach has turned the particle accelerator into a new kind of microscope\u2014and led to the discovery of new behavior in the forces that hold matter together.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/lckg-sdh9\" target=\"_blank\">study appearing this week<\/a> in the journal <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>, the team reports results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)\u2014a massive underground, ring-shaped accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. Rather than focus on the accelerator\u2019s particle collisions, the MIT team searched for instances when particles barely glanced by each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Particle accelerators reveal the heart of nuclear matter by smashing together atoms at close to the speed of light. The high-energy collisions produce a shower of subatomic fragments that scientists can then study to reconstruct the core building blocks of matter. An MIT-led team has now used the world\u2019s most powerful particle accelerator to discover [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}