While the Standard Model ℠ describes all known fundamental particles and many of the interactions between them, it fails to explain dark matter, dark energy and the apparent asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. Over the past decades, physicists have thus introduced various frameworks and methods to study physics beyond the SM, one of which is known as the King plot.

The King plot is a graphical technique used to analyze isotope shifts, variations in the energy levels of different isotopes (e.g., atoms of the same element that contain a different number of neutrons). This graphical tool has proved promising for separating effects explained by the SM from signals linked to new physics.

Researchers at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, and ETH Zurich recently collected new measurements that tightened King plot-based constraints on the properties of a hypothetical particle that has not yet been observed, known as a Yukawa-type boson.

New research published by Michigan State University astrophysicists could help scientists answer a century-old question: Where did galactic cosmic rays come from?

Cosmic rays—high-energy particles moving close to the speed of light—originated from somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, but exactly where has been a mystery since they were discovered in 1912. Shuo Zhang, MSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and her group led two studies that shed new light on where cosmic rays might have come from. The recently published findings were presented at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.

The sources of these high-energy, fast-moving particles could bear the nature of black holes, supernova remnants and star-forming regions. These extreme astrophysical events are also known to produce neutrinos—tiny, nearly massless particles that are found in abundance not only deep in space, but also on our planet.