Searching for new physics using ultracold molecules

High-energy physics is in a peculiar position. Having tested the Standard Model – the description of all known particles and forces, bar gravity – to what might have been expected to be its breaking point, we’ve found no clear flaws in that theoretical edifice. And yet it accounts for what makes up just 5% of the known universe, while dark matter and dark energy remain mysterious. Nor do we know why this much ordinary matter exists at all, given that cosmological theories predict that the Big Bang should have formed equal amounts of matter and antimatter that should mutually annihilate.

With such puzzles in mind, particle physicists have drawn up plans for an even larger successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, which completed the Standard Model by identifying the Higgs boson in 2012. The Future Circular Collider, overlapping the LHC’s circular tunnel like a Venn diagram, would have a whopping circumference of 100km and give access to larger energy scales, at an estimated cost of $9 billion (£7.3 billion).