I want to go to graduate school for experimental particle physics. My ideal work would be to learn how to build and calibrate silly little detectors, although it seems like most research right now is on calibrating silly large detectors. I've heard theoretical HEP positions are very competitive, and I likely don't have the grades or research experience to get into one anyway. The only advantages I really have is I have experience in building circuits, computers, optical setups, and I had a fluorescence microscopy research job. I'm also a citizen of a country that likely gets 99% of its applicants from people who need visas, but I really don't know if that matters. Could I have a chance at getting into an experimental HEP master's program?

This year Nobel prize in physics goes to neutrinos research, they are almost impossible to detect but not quite 😉
I made this meme inspired by these fascinating evasive particles 😍

As mentioned above, I’m a 15 years old doing gcse and would take it on 2026 may june and start a levels on june right after i finished gcse. Everything seems great until the question “which a levels are you doing” which eventually lead to “what do you want to do”. As of currently, I have two in mind; which are medicine and physics.

For physics, ever since i was young ( about 7/8 ), i started watching videos about astronomy on youtube in my native language. Later when i was 11, i started learning english which extends the physics contents i could watch on youtube. At 13, i finally got to learn physics in secondary but i didn’t study at that time and hence, grades were not great. However, starting from 15(Now) i started taking studies seriously. In April this year, I got A and A* in school tests and got the idea to use proton-antiproton annihilation process as a propulsion mechanism for interstellar travel, I emphasize on traveling to alpha centauri system within a human lifetime. Luckily, my physics teacher for my physics class is a hypernuclear experimental physicist that has done many researches. I went to his desk and purposed my idea of this, asked him to be my supervisor for this research. He accepted it after seeing
my research paper plan. We met every monday for discussion for a paper i wrote that is related to my research. However, since last 2 months, he suggested that i focus on gcse physics instead but i replied i already finished the entire context of gcse ( 6 months earlier than school ) so he made me take 4 gcse mock tests and i must get a atleast 95% and i got them. I asked him what do i do next then he said i should try answering a level physics and get 80%. For summary, i always had a interest in physics ever since i was young and still do. I believe I’m good at and think i would make a great physicist or researcher.

For medicine, when i was about 12, my grandfather had a paralytic stroke and dementia to the point he doesn’t remember his own daughter ( he lives with her under same roof ) but when i went to visit him before his death, i calmly walked up to him and asked him “grandpa do you know who i am?” And he replied “of course, you are my only grandson, my grandson.” This sentence has been in my heart since then and i never had the chance to be that close with my grandparents from both parents. His speech changed my dream career from a scientist to a doctor; particularly neurologist or neurosurgeon so that future people will never get to experience what i did which is the most tragic moment of my life yet. Additionally, i get decent grades in Bio such as B and A, not that great.

What i need to now decide is that whether i must become a physicist or a doctor and who else would be the best to discuss this with? PHYSICISTS and DOCTORS i believe.

I have been thinking about this decision for months so please take this seriously as this could be regretting if i made the wrong choice. I don’t expect you guys to make this decision entirely as this is my only life but i’d to hear opinions!

Thank you for reading and the opinion if you can.

Hi everyone!

A little background for context: I am a fourth year undergraduate student (Physics, Astrophysics, Mathematics) about to start applying for Physics PhDs. I have research experience with DUNE/ProtoDUNE anomaly detection using ML at Fermilab and LHCb collider analysis using BDTs on Monte Carlo simulated data. I’ve also done DUNE hardware research and astronomy research, but that is less relevant to this question.

I plan to apply to computational neutrino/HEP, but I’ve also become interested in computational QCD and using my experience with ML towards QCD phenomenology. I’m wanting to understand how the research lifestyle, postdoc/national lab opportunities, and long term academic positions compare to computational neutrino/HEP where slightly more familiar.

I have not taken any QFT in undergrad, though I assume this is not a deal breaker and schools don’t assume incoming students will know QFT already? I will have taken graduate Quantum Mechanics I & II, and have taken graduate complex analysis and partial differential equations.

I would appreciate any kind of information! If there are any QCD theorists, I would love to hear how your day-to-day goes and if you enjoy what you do. Also, if you think my background sounds like I don’t have the right preparation for this kind of field, I definitely get it, and it would help a lot to hear that here. Thanks!

Preprint: https://bootloops.ai/FeynmanBootstrap.pdf

im quite intrigued by these having seen them earlier in this year. I'm an alevel student and want to understand them more to put on my personal statement for uni haha. im struggling to find info on them because it's so new I suppose? if anyone has any links or can explain it that would be amazing:)

Don't miss it!

Thread for papers, conference slides, collaboration statements, experimental follow-up, any such things that arise. Technical updates and falsifiable interpretations of the candidate, not repetitive DM sensationalism nor rebuttal.

Assumed prior knowledge:

- LZ presented high-energy nuclear recoil search at TeVPA 2026, including unusual event ~248keVnr on 16th June 2023,

- largest local excess 3.4σ, corrected to 2.6σ global from look-elsewhere, so tension with background-only model under this analysis,

- ordinary spin-independent elastic WIMP scattering generally predicts low-energy recoil spectrum so isolated event up around 248keV not obviously vanilla,

- recoil window was deliberately extended to look for surprises.

Discussion of models welcome, namely: Endothermic/DM interpretations, Christopher McCabe's potential discriminator of strong annual modulation so tracking when during the year they occur, elastic spin-dependent/pseudoscalar interactions á la Di Mauro, Unwin. Lou & Lu neutral-current absorption of fermionic DM on xenon, etc.

Updates such as:

Another event in same high-energy region, cluster or recoil spectrum consistent with proposed interactions, matching excess in another target, annual modulation, successful exclusion of rare-background mechanisms, etc.

The story so far:

1 Sept 2026 - LZ result presented at TeVPA. 248 keVnr candidate; 3.4σ local / 2.6σ global. Immediate inelastic-DM interpretations with ~300-350keV excited-state splitting proposed.

2 Sept 2026 - fermionic absorption interpretation could reproduce the recoil energy but required benchmark in substantial tension with KamLAND.

3 Sept 2026 - elastic axion-portal interpretation, pseudoscalar interaction as non-inelastic alternative. Strong annual modulation.

Dark Matter at the Kinematic Edge: Interpreting the 248 keV LZ Nuclear-Recoil Candidate - Mattia Di Mauro

Fermionic Dark Matter Absorption and the High-Energy Event in LUX-ZEPLIN - Yuanchao Lou, Chih-Ting Lu

Axion Portal Dark Matter and the LUX-ZEPLIN High-Recoil Event - James Unwin

Seasonal dark matter from the LUX-ZEPLIN high-energy event - Christopher McCabe

The world’s biggest dark matter search saw a particle it cannot explain

Don't miss it!

from my understanding of how gluons work, they unlike photons carry two of six color charges and because of this they attract each other.

my question is do they attract each other regardless of color charge or do they only generally attract eachother because "opposites attract" just like with the electromagnetic force and it happens that the chance of them being "opposites" is higher then them being similar because of the increase in charge options.

Assuming the BESIII interpretation of X(2370) as a predominantly pseudoscalar glueball continues to hold up, where do you think the research becomes most interesting from here?

What caught my attention is that glueballs have been a prediction of QCD for decades, but actually identifying one experimentally has proven remarkably difficult. If X(2370) really is our first convincing example of a glueball-dominated state, it feels like we’re finally getting an experimental window into a part of non-perturbative QCD that has largely been approached through theory and lattice calculations.

Also interesting to think about what more precise decay measurements could tell us about glueball-quarkonium mixing, and whether establishing a broader glueball spectrum would materially change our understanding of hadron structure and gluon dynamics.

It’s obviously far too early to start attaching practical applications to any of this, but that’s also part of what I find interesting about fundamental physics. Some of the most consequential applications in science started with somebody studying something that, at the time, had absolutely no obvious use.

Curious what people working closer to QCD and hadron spectroscopy make of it.

BESIII Collaboration, “Lightest 0−+ Glueball as Dominant Constituent of X(2370)” (2026):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20366

I've seen a lot of people/sites saying that scientists at the BEPC in China have found a particle confirmed to be a glueball & I want to make sure that their claim is true. Is there any truth to it?

good evening everybody, i’m a 19 year old american trying to learn and eventually master particle physics to study antimatter. i have a basic understanding of calculus, learning up to essentially calc 1 and at an equivalent level of learning as far as the physics side goes. i study cybersecurity in college but cant afford a second degree, so im trying to find a solid way to learn enough on my own to take one mastery exam for an online degree. if you guys have any resources or specific things that helped you learn calculus or physics ideas in a concentrated way that can be easily retained, please reply here or dm me if you’d be interested in working together with me. been thinking about starting up a discord server (assuming i find enough people) to get collective knowledge in a single platform. if anyone is interested in that kind of project as well, please let me know. i learn better when i have people to explain ideas to so you’d be helping me greatly.

Hi, so I'm a student who wants to pursue particle physics. I recently got myself the Particle Data Group Review book from CERN. So, if someone who could help me understand the reviews and papers in the book it'd be a great help.

I just grad from PhD in particle physics, where I was working mostly on ML, programming, data analysis, etc. I also graduated from an "elite" school at the UK in theoretical physics, so I know some math as well. I thought I should be popular at the job market; turns out it's a big no: The quant firm thinks I am not doing stat/mental math cleverly enough, and software engineers think I am bad because I didn't master LeetCode, the AI/ML stuff they all focus on with LLMs and won't let any non CS ppl touch their stuff; quantum computing reject as they think I am not a physicist enough. I felt like I am 80% good at all of the above, but nothing can be 100%. Now I am in depression, don't know how to deal with the market.

TLDR: Society thinks I am a jack of all trades, ace of nothing