A quarkless supercollider may finally shed light on dark matter

Summary

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 ring—about seven times the length of the Indy 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 into 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.” The Large Hadron Collider lives in a 27-kilometer tunnel ring, about 100 meters underneath France and Switzerland. It was used to discover the Higgs boson, but further research may require something larger still. Maximilien Brice/CERN The minor quibbles physicists have about the Standard Model could be explained by new particles: Dark matter, the invisible material whose gravity shapes the universe, is thought to be made of heretofore undiscovered particles. But such new particles may be out of reach for the LHC, even after it undergoes upgrades that are set to be completed later this decade. To address these lingering questions, particle physicists have been planning its successors. These next-generation colliders will improve...