After months of excitement and almost continuous, frenetic activity since August, AMBER’s vast experimental hall — more than 10 m high and stretching over 60 m from the upstream collimators to the far wall — now feels unusually quiet and solitary. Only a few days ago, however, physicists from universities and research institutes across several countries, many of them early-career researchers, were working day and night to bring a brand-new experimental apparatus to life and to record the first beam data.

At a seminar held at CERN this week, the NA62 collaboration reported the unequivocal confirmation of the ultra-rare decay of a positively charged kaon into a positively charged pion and a neutrino–antineutrino pair. Experiments including NA62 have previously measured and seen evidence of this process, but this is the first time it has been measured with a statistical significance of five standard deviations, crossing the threshold traditionally required to claim a discovery in particle physics.

An international team led by Jakub Vícha from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences has proposed a revolutionary "heavy metal" scenario that may change the view on the composition of the most energetic particles arriving from space.

It is impossible to colonize and conquer the galaxy, according to the general theory of relativity. Nevertheless, human imagination is full of visions of a future where humanity has reached even the most distant corners of our galaxy. FORTE researcher Justin C. Feng from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, has now proposed a way to turn this dream into reality in the distant future.