How particle physics will continue after the last collider | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Jul, 2025

MarylandDigitalNews.comSCIENCE

posted on Jul. 21, 2025 at 2:35 pm

Whether two particles collide inside an accelerator or in the depths of space is irrelevant; all that matters is that we can detect the debris of what comes out, including newly created “daughter” particles. Although the flux of high-energy particles in space is lower, the achievable energies are far greater than in terrestrial laboratories. (Credit: flashmovie / Adobe Stock)

Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we’ll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won’t be the end.

Since the 1800s, energetic particles have probed the fundamental nature of matter.

Rutherford’s gold foil experiment showed that the atom was mostly empty space, but that there was a concentration of mass at one point that was far greater than the mass of an alpha particle: the atomic nucleus. By observing that some of the emitted, radioactive particles bounced back, or ricocheted off, in a different direction than they were emitted in, Rutherford was able to demonstrate the existence of a compact, massive nucleus to the atom. (Credit: Chris Impey)

By bombarding matter with other particles, we probe their internal structures.

The production of matter/antimatter pairs (left) from two photons is a completely reversible reaction (right), with matter/antimatter annihilating back to two photons. This creation-and-annihilation process, which obeys E = mc², is the only known way to create and destroy matter or antimatter. If high-energy gamma-rays collide with other particles, there is a chance to produce electron-positron pairs, diminishing the gamma-ray flux observed at great distances. (Credit: Dmitri Pogosyan/University of Alberta)

At still greater energies, we create new quanta via Einstein’s E = mc².

By taking a hot air balloon up to high altitudes, far higher than could be achieved by simply walking, hiking, or driving to any location, scientist Victor Hess was able to use a detector to demonstrate the existence and reveal the components of cosmic rays. In many ways, these early expeditions, dating back to 1912, marked the birth of cosmic ray astrophysics. (Credit: VF Hess Society, Schloss Pöllau/Austria)

Early experiments with cosmic rays first revealed heavy, unstable Standard Model particles.

The first muon ever detected, along with other cosmic ray particles, was determined to be the same charge as the electron, but hundreds of times heavier, due to its speed and radius of curvature. The muon was the first of the heavier generations of particles to be discovered, dating all the way back to the 1930s. (Credit: P. Kunze, Zeitschrift für Physik, 1933)

MarylandDigitalNews.comJuly 21, 2025

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