Double beta decay research represents a pivotal field at the intersection of nuclear physics and particle physics, probing the fundamental nature of neutrinos and their role in the matter–antimatter ...

An elongation versus departure from axial symmetry (triaxiality) plot showing distinctive differences in the shapes of the parent (germanium-76, “rigid”) and daughter (selenium-76, “soft”) nuclei for ...

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential ...

Off the southern coast of Lake Baikal in Siberia, an underwater telescope has been installed to detect neutrinos. For years physicists debated whether the neutrino had mass or was massless like the ...

Halloween horror movies often feature ghosts slipping through walls unnoticed by those in the dwellings they haunt. At the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, scientists seek ...

Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current ...

The neutrino is now central to elementary particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Neutrinos play a key role in theories that unify the elementary particles and forces. They yield clues about ...

Sheltered underneath nearly a mile of rock in Abruzzo, Italy, scientists are hard at work unraveling the secrets of the universe's smallest bits of matter. When a radioactive process called beta decay ...

The problem remains that majorons, like all hypothetical dark matter particles, have never been detected and experiments keep putting finer and finer limits on their potential existence. I'm almost ...

Physicists want to ramp up their efforts to weigh neutrinos, which are perhaps the most mysterious of all elementary particles. Currently, only one experiment in the world has a shot at making such a ...