Casting a wider net“10 years ago, experiments (at the LHC and beyond) were searching for dark-matter particles with masses above the proton mass (1 GeV) and below a few TeV. That is, they were targeting classical WIMPs such as those predicted by SUSY. Fast forward 10 years and dark-matter experiments are now searching for WIMP-like particles with masses as low as around 1 MeV and as high as 100 TeV,” says Tait. “And the null results from searches, such as at the LHC, have inspired many other possible explanations for the nature of dark matter, from fuzzy dark matter made of particles with masses as low as 10−22 eV to primordial black holes with masses equivalent to several suns. In light of this, the dark-matter community has begun to cast a wider net to explore a larger landscape of possibilities.” Show  On the collider front, the LHC researchers have begun to investigate some of these new possibilities. For example, they have started looking at the hypothesis that dark matter is part of a larger dark sector with several new types of dark particles. These dark-sector particles could include a dark-matter equivalent of the photon, the dark photon, which would interact with the other dark-sector particles as well as the known particles, and long-lived particles, which are also predicted by SUSY models. “Dark-sector scenarios provide a new set of experimental signatures, and this is a new playground for LHC physicists,” says Doglioni. “We are now expanding upon the experimental methods that we are familiar with, so we can try to catch rare and unusual signals buried in large backgrounds. Moreover, many other current and planned experiments are also targeting dark sectors and particles interacting more feebly than WIMPs. Some of these experiments, such as the newly approved FASER experiment, are sharing knowledge, technology and even accelerator complex with the main LHC experiments, and they will complement the reach of LHC searches for non-WIMP dark matter, as shown by the CERN Physics Beyond Colliders initiative.” Finally, the LHC researchers are still working on data from Run 2, and the data gathered so far, from Run 1 and Run 2, is only about 5% of the total that the experiments will record. Given this, as well as the immense knowledge gained from the many LHC analyses thus far conducted, there’s perhaps a fighting chance that the LHC will discover a dark-matter particle in the next 10 years. “It’s the fact we haven’t found it yet and the possibility that we may find it in the not-so-distant future that keeps me excited about my job,” says Harris. “The last 10 years have shown us that dark matter might be different from what we had initially thought, but that doesn’t mean it is not there for us to find,” says Cid Vidal. “We will leave no stone unturned, no matter how big or small and how long it will take us,” says Pani. Further reading: Hero header image: NASA, ESA, H.Teplitz and M.Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (ASU), Z. Levay (STScI) Don't miss the next articles of our series, which will cover the Standard Model, the early universe and more. What does “CERN” stand for?At an intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951, the first resolution concerning the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research (in French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) was adopted. Two months later, an agreement was signed establishing the provisional Council – the acronym CERN was born. Today, our understanding of matter goes much deeper than the nucleus, and CERN's main area of research is particle physics. Because of this, the laboratory operated by CERN is often referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. What is the LHC?The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. The beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.
Searching for the truth: Scientists at CERN, including Fabiola Gianotti, the current Director General Image: REUTERS/Pierre Albouy Ceri ParkerPreviously Commissioning Editor, Agenda, World Economic Forum — Schumpeter, The Economist License and Republishing World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Global Agenda The Agenda WeeklyA weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda What is CERN trying to discover?What is CERN's mission? At CERN, our work helps to uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. We do this by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers, to advance the boundaries of human knowledge.
What are they looking for at CERN?Other new experiments at CERN probing the nature of the universe will focus on collisions of high-energy ions, to better understand the plasma that was present only in the first microsecond after the Big Bang; probe the insides of protons; study cosmic rays; and search for the still-hypothetical magnetic monopole, an ...
What has CERN discovered today?The 27 kilometre-long LHC at CERN is the machine that found the Higgs boson particle. That, along with its linked energy field, is thought to be vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
What is CERN doing in 2022?2022: Higgs10, LHC Run 3 and restart
The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), restarted on 22 April 2022 after more than three years for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work.
|
What is CERN trying to find out?
direito autoral © 2024 cumeu Inc.
