What are the fundamental building blocks of the matter that makes up our universe, and how do they interact? Physicist Jaco ter Hoeve has mapped in detail the physics beyond the Standard Model in his research. He demonstrated where new particles may possibly be located, along with their likelihood and properties.
The question of what matter is made of has been a central concern in modern physics for decades. This question is addressed by the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the elementary particles and forces around us at the smallest scales, namely one billionth of a billionth of a metre. The Standard Model's greatest success to date is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which helps explain how particles acquire mass.
Despite this success, many unresolved questions remain that the Standard Model cannot answer, and these gaps may be filled by new (yet-to-be-discovered) particles. Ter Hoeve’s research maps out in detail the new physics beyond the Standard Model. “This is akin to casting a large fishing net into the ocean in search of that one unknown particle,” says Ter Hoeve. He used data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva) for this work. The LHC is an underground particle accelerator housed in a ring-shaped tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres.
He developed a new method by applying advanced machine learning techniques to extract the maximum amount of information from the experimental data. The research shows where new particles might be located, along with their likely properties and probabilities. It also maps the expected impact of future experiments.
