Seeing the light

For decades, physicists have revealed the fundamental building blocks and forces of nature by building ever larger and more energetic particle colliders. Many believe that the next set of discoveries will come by pushing to even higher energy with even larger machines.

Not everyone believes that. Many physicists argue that now we have identified the family of fundamental particles and forces that make up the so-called Standard Model, the time has come to think differently and that we may need to move away from hugely expensive large-scale collaborations to smaller, less costly experiments.

Imperial has a foot in both camps. It is involved in large collaborations like the CMS and LHCb experiments on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the forthcoming neutrino experiment DUNE at Chicago’s Fermilab.

Imperial physicists are also working on relatively modest “tabletop” experiments which, despite their compact footprints, could shed light on some of the most interesting questions in fundamental physics: why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? Does dark matter exist and what form does it take if so? What can we learn from gravitational waves? What is this dark energy that is said to be accelerating the expansion of the universe?

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