The Experimental Study of Particle Interactions at High Energy

Physicists at Cambridge are smashing particles together at the Large Hadron Collider and firing neutrinos through detectors in the US to find out why the Universe is made of matter and not antimatter, and what dark matter actually is. This matters because the current best theory of fundamental particles—the Standard Model—cannot explain these basic facts about the cosmos. The Universe should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter after the Big Bang, yet everything we see is matter. Dark matter makes up most of the mass in the Universe, but no one has ever detected a particle of it. This research aims to find the missing physics. The project is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. It is driven by curiosity about how the Universe works at its most basic level. However, past fundamental particle physics has produced technologies that quietly underpin modern life: the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, and particle detectors are now used in medical scanners and security systems. A deeper understanding of matter and antimatter could, over decades, reshape how we think about energy, matter, and the fabric of reality itself.