The search for the basic building blocks of the universe
Physicists working in elementary particle physics at CERN are investigating what holds the world together at its very core. Among the big unsolved questions are the origin of dark matter and the difference between matter and antimatter.
What holds the world and the universe together at its core? What are the basic building blocks and what are the fundamental forces at work? Researchers at UZH and ETH are at the forefront of finding answers to these questions with their experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator at CERN.
We will show you what quarks, leptons and bosons are and how we study them at LHC. You will also learn how we are trying to detect the mysterious dark matter in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory near Rome. Cosmological measurements suggest that there is much more dark matter in the universe than normal matter, about 5.5 times more. But what exactly dark matter is, however, is still unclear.
At our stand, you will learn from exhibits and computer animations which scientific questions we are interested in, how we use experiments to find answers and which physical insights we get. We will also show how we work together in large international collaborations at CERN.
