This month is a time to celebrate. European Organization for Nuclear Research, Cern, has just announced the discovery of four brand new particles at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. This means that the hadron collider has now found a total of 59 new particles, in addition to the Nobel prize-winning Higgs boson, since it started colliding protons – particles that make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons – in 2009.
Excitingly, while some of these new particles were expected based on our established theories, some were altogether more surprising.
The hadron collider’s goal is to explore the structure of matter at the shortest distances and highest energies ever probed in the lab – testing our current best theory of nature: the Standard Model of Particle Physics. And the hadron collider has delivered the goods – it enabled scientists to discover the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the model. That said, the theory is still far from being fully…