CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, has embarked on a detailed feasibility study for the first stage of its Future Circular Collider (FCC). This stage, known as FCC-ee, would involve a machine to smash electrons together with antielectrons, and could cost some 15 billion Swiss francs (US$17 billion) by the time it is completed in the mid-2040s. The initial phase of that study, focusing on the technical aspects, had a positive outcome, CERN said in February. But Germany, which already contributes '267 million (US$290 million) annually to CERN ' some 20% of the lab's budget ' cannot afford to spend more, said Eckart Lilienthal of the country's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) on 23 May, at a workshop for particle physicists in Bonn, Germany. The preliminary cost estimates for the FCC-ee 'are subject to a large number of uncertainties, the effects of which are still largely unknown', a BMBF spokesperson told Nature. 'The financing plan is extremely vague and requires a high level of commitment from external partners, which is neither assured nor even in prospect at the present time. Given these conditions, Germany cannot support funding of the project at this point.'...

It was 60 years ago when Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists independently thought of this mechanism around the same time, including Francois Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building in those years,which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields. Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland ' ATLAS and the CMS ' confirmed Higgs' predictions when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson half a century later. It was the last missing component of the standard model, and Higgs and Englert shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for predicting its existence. Physicists at the LHC continue to learn about the properties of the Higgs boson, but some researchers say that only a dedicated collider that can produce the particle in copious amounts ' dubbed a 'Higgs factory' ' will enable them to gain a profound understanding of its role....

Conditions at the lab were called into question in 2021, when Fermilab failed an annual assessment by its overseer, the US Department of Energy (DoE). It received a B grade overall ' a B+ was required to pass ' and earned a C for its handling of the troubled multibillion-dollar Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), the nation's flagship particle-physics project. Last year, the DoE took the unusual step of opening the bidding on the contract to run Fermilab, which since 2007 has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA) ' a partnership between the University of Chicago in Illinois and the Universities Research Association, a consortium of 90 mostly-US-based universities. A University of Chicago spokesperson emphasized the university's 'deep and longstanding commitment' to Fermilab, and declined to comment further, but Nature has confirmed that the FRA is reapplying to manage the lab. The FRA is not the only contender. Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), which runs the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has confirmed that it is competing for the contract. 'AUI excels in making scientific and technological breakthroughs possible by delivering on large science projects on-time and on-budget,' AUI chief executive Adam Cohen told Nature. 'We are very interested in bringing our experience to the challenges we understand exist at Fermi.'...

One way physicists seek clues to unravel the mysteries of the universe is by smashing matter together and inspecting the debris. But these types of destructive experiments, while incredibly informative, have limits. We are two scientists who study nuclear and particle physics using CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Working with an international group of nuclear and particle physicists, our team realized that hidden in the data from previous studies was a remarkable and innovative experiment. Our novel approach looks at the times incoming particles in the accelerator whiz by each other rather than the times they smash together in head-on collisions. Surprisingly, this approach enables far more accurate measurements of the tau particle's wobble than previous techniques. This is the first time in nearly 20 years scientists have measured this wobble, known as the tau magnetic moment, and it may help illuminate tantalizing cracks emerging in the known laws of physics. Electrons, the building blocks of atoms, have two heavier cousins called the muon and the tau. Taus are the heaviest in this family of three and the most mysterious, as they exist only for minuscule amounts of time....