AIL-Talk: Pauline Gagnon Who Cares about Particle Physics?

This talk will help you make sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. I explain for non-experts how the current theoretical model called the Standard Model describes the basic constituents of matter. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 brought in the last missing piece of this model but it still only describes « visible matter », that is, everything we see in stars and galaxies. It leaves out « dark matter », a mysterious type of matter five times more prevalent but still completely unknown. I will show how physicists are currently looking for new particles and a more encompassing theory that would go beyond the Standard Model to explain what dark matter could be. I will also show how fundamental research has impacted our lives and why it is so important.