Taking the temperature of a sample can be tricky—especially in the regimes of the very small and the very cold. The smaller the sample, the greater the influence the thermometer itself may exert on the measurement. And in the ultracold regime, even tiny amounts of heat can significantly alter the temperature reading.
Binding together quarks into protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei is a force so strong, it’s in the name. The strong force, which is carried by gluon particles, is the strongest of all fundamental forces of nature – the others being electromagnetism, the weak force and gravity. Yet, it’s the least precisely measured of these four forces. In a paper just submitted to Nature Physics, the ATLAS collaboration describes how it has used the Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, to determine the strength of the strong force with an unprecedented uncertainty of below 1%.