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Physics

Evidence of new physics could have been under our noses all along

For almost a decade, the world's most expensive experiment failed to break new ground. But its biggest discoveries may have gone unnoticed

By Justin Eure

13 February 2019

streetlamp artwork

Bruno Mangyoku

IT’S an old joke. A woman returning home finds a neighbour searching for his keys beneath a street lamp. “Is that where you dropped them?” she asks. “No,” he replies, “but it’s where the light is.”

Change a few details and you could be describing the current state of particle physics. Except nobody’s laughing.

For over a decade, the most expensive experiment on Earth has been flinging protons at one another at a hair’s breadth shy of the speed of light. These trillions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – part of the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland – have helped confirm our existing picture of reality. But many fundamental problems that the LHC was built to answer remain infuriatingly open.

For a rising generation of physicists, the threat of stagnation means it is time to rethink our search. Instead of building ever more powerful experiments, they have a radical proposal. They believe experiments like the LHC may have already found the signature of exciting new physics – we just didn’t know they were there.

Combing through millions of gigabytes of data for those missed clues is complicated and time-consuming, and will require powerful new algorithms. That is why some want a shortcut. They are zeroing in on the blind spots that plagued our previous searches, hot on the trail of a promising new idea lurking in the shadows. Their proposal of a nest of particles whose interactions kept them hidden could hold the key to the most perplexing problems in physics. Alternatively, it could amount to nothing. Either way, it is time we ventured into the darkness.…

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