From the Higgs to dark matter

A quiet turmoil agitates the international scientific community, as cosmology and particle physics discretely inch toward a pivotal paradigm shift.

The giant detectors that have allowed the much celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson, for which the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded this October, now sit quietly in the depths of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider tunnel — barely fitting in their underground hall, like the green apple in Magritte’s painting The Listening Room — waiting for the accelerator to be upgraded and brought to its maximum discovery potential, sometime around the end of 2014.

When new beams of particles start to circulate again in the 27-kilometerlong tunnel, it will be at almost twice the energy reached in the previous run: an energy that may allow the creation and discovery of new particles, including hopefully the mysterious ones that seem to permeate, shape, and support the entire Universe: dark matter particles.