"I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale."
- Marie Curie, Chemist and Physicist (1867 - 1934)
What is particle physics?
Particle physics is concerned with the building blocks of matter and the forces that they exert on each other.
Particle physicists are interested in questions like:
What is dark matter and dark energy?
What gives fundamental particles mass?
Where does gravity fit into all of this?
What is terascale physics?
Terascale physics is concerned with the generation of mass and with theories that encompass extra dimensions, supersymmetry (SUSY) and new forces. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collides protons or ions at an energy in the ‘terascale’—so coined because of the scale of energies used in particle physics—one trillion or 10^12 electron volts. Terascale experiments at the LHC are where physicists enter unchartered territory.