Exploitation of the CMS experiment at the LHC, construction of MICE phase 2 and R&D for large-scale neutrino detectors.

Physicists are building a beamline to corral muons into a narrow stream, while simultaneously exploiting the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector to hunt for new particles and study the Higgs boson. This work addresses two fundamental gaps in knowledge. First, the Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete—it cannot explain why matter dominates antimatter in the universe, nor does it account for dark matter. Second, no one has yet produced a focused muon beam intense enough to generate the neutrino beams needed to probe this asymmetry. If successful, the muon-collimation technique will enable the construction of million-tonne neutrino detectors. These could reveal why the universe is made of matter rather than nothing at all. The LHC studies, meanwhile, may uncover supersymmetric particles or new gauge bosons that reshape our understanding of mass and force. This is primarily curiosity-driven fundamental science. There is no immediate practical application for a muon beam or a neutrino detector. But past fundamental particle physics—from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN—has repeatedly generated unforeseen technologies. A deeper grasp of matter–antimatter asymmetry could one day inform new energy or propulsion concepts, though that remains speculative.