Supercollider Engineers Are Trying to Break Physics: If They Do, We May Finally Understand Dark Matter

Abstract

In Particle Physics, the smallest problems often require the biggest solutions. • Along the border of France and Switzerland, around a hundred meters underneath the countryside, protons speed through a 27-kilometer riung-about seven times the length of the landy 500 circuit-until they crash into protons going in the opposite direction. These particle pileups produce a petabyte of data every second, the most interesting of which is poured into data centers, accessible to thousands of physicists worldwide. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), arguably the largest experiment ever engineered, is needed to probe the universe,s smallest constituents. In 2012, two teams at the LHC discovered the elusive Higgs boson, the particle whose existence confirmed 50-year-old theories about the origins of mass. It was a scientific triumph that led to a Nobel Prize and worldwide plaudits. Since then, experiments at the LHC have focused on better understanding how the newfound Higgs fits inti the Standard Model, particle physicists' best theoretical description of matter and forces-minus gravity. “The Standard Model is beautiful,” says Victoria Martin, an experimental physicist at the University of Edinburgh. “Because it's so precise, all the little niggles stand out.”