Particle Physics

Everything, including ourselves, is made of matter whose underlying structure is governed by basic laws. The Science and Technology Facilities Council's particle physicists investigate the structure of matter at the most fundamental level by looking at the sub-atomic particles that make up atoms.

One of the current goals in particle physics is to complete the 'Standard Model', so far physicists have detected all but one of the particles predicted by this theory. The Higgs particle, which is thought to be responsible for giving particles their mass still remains undiscovered. But the Standard Model does not give a complete theory of everything as it does not include gravity and does not explain recently observed neutrino oscillations and so physicists are looking for phenomena 'beyond the Standard Model'. There are hints that new physics such as dark matter and supersymmetry exists and so the search is on to find experimental proof. These searches require the development of new detectors that push technology to the limit.

Particle physics experiments can be massive, some using high energy particle accelerators many kilometres in diameter and STFC funds physicists working on experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider(The site opens in a new window) (LHC) at  CERN (link opens in a new window) the European research laboratory in Switzerland and T2K (Tokai To Kamioka (link opens in a new window)) in Japan.