Two thousand feet under the shores of Lake Erie, in a six-story salt cavern, one of the most sophisticated light detectors ever constructed is waiting. Every second, several particles speed through ...

Does the proton decay? While this was a famous prediction of Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) developed in the 1970s and 1980s, experimentalists have ruled it out—or rather, put lower limits on its mean ...

In an article published in 2002 in the journal Physics Letters B, my Ph.D. student Maurizio Piai (now Professor of Physics at Swansea University, Swansea, UK) and I proposed an experiment with reactor ...

Some scientists spend decades trying to catch a glimpse of a rare process. But with good experimental design and a lot of luck, they often need only a handful of signals to make a discovery. In 2009, ...

An international team of nuclear physicists has created zinc-54 for the first time. Moreover, they have confirmed that it can undergo two-proton decay, a rare process that has only been seen in one ...

A photomultiplier is a light detection device that consists of a specialized vacuum tube, which is constructed along the lines of Figure 1. Responding to as little as a single photon, these devices ...

Galaxies, stars, planets and life, all are formed from one essential substance: matter. But the abundance of matter is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of physics. The Big Bang, 13.8 billion ...

Two independent teams of nuclear physicists have found evidence for a new form of radioactivity involving the simultaneous emission of two protons. Researchers at the GANIL laboratory in France and ...