FRANCE: The world of science broke into celebration with the declaration that the Higgs boson – sometimes controversially referred to as the ‘god particle’ – had been found. Large Hadron Collider will be restarted in March after a £97 million upgrade that could help solve some of the universe’s greatest remaining mysteries.
The discovery of the particle, which is believed to give mass to matter, was a crowning achievement and justification for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern. But one scientist has told MailOnline we can expect even greater discoveries from the collider in the coming years – and one in particular could be the most important in history. Dr Monica Dunford, originally from California and now a researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, worked at Cern in Switzerland until 2013.
She is one of six scientists who feature in the widely acclaimed documentary Particle Fever, which chronicles the first round of experiments at the LHC at Cern in 2008, leading up to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Finding the Higgs boson was one of the primary goals of the LHC – but perhaps the LHC’s most important moment is yet to come. ‘One of the things I’m most interested in is creating and discovering dark matter,’ Dr Dunford said. ‘We know from measurements of cosmology that 25 percent of the universe is dark matter and we have absolutely no idea what that is.
For comparison, what we do know, electrons and protons, only count for four percent. ‘You have this huge chunk of a pie and no idea what it consists of. ‘One thing we could possibly produce would be a dark matter candidate via its decay products.
‘Being able to produce it at the LHC would be a huge connection between our astronomical measurements and what we can produce in the laboratory.’
On whether it would be the LHC’s most important discovery to date, she said: ‘Personally yes. It would be a bigger discovery than the Higgs boson. ‘For the Higgs we had a very good concrete theoretical prediction; for dark matter we really have no idea what it would be.’ She added: ‘There is no particle that we know of today that can explain dark matter, let alone what dark energy might be.
