Question: Also have you finished rebuilding the hydron collider yet. I understand that a few years ago you built it and proved that the particle existed, but since then you have made improvements. What improvements have you made? What sort of tests did you go through to find the Higgs particle? And also will you be continuing to use the Hydron Collider to find more particles and solve other mysteries in science which do not yet have an explanation?

Adrian Buzatu answered on 5 Mar 2016:

You have an excellent grasp of particle physics already! We use a “microscope” to zoom inside matter. Our microscope is a particle accelerator. The largest one on Earth. The Large Hadron Collider. We take photos of what we see with the microscope. Our cameras are particle detectors, such as ATLAS and CMS. Every few years, both the accelerator and detectors are improved in both hardware in software.

The Higgs boson has indeed been discovered, confirming that our current theory is correct. We collect now a larger set of these particles and study their properties in detail. We hope to find that its properties vary, even if slightly, from what the current theory says. That’s because we know the current theory does not explain everything. There must be a larger theory that has the current theory as a particular case.

Our experiments also look for all particles. They are hundreds of new particles predicted by theorists and we search for each one of them. Unfortunately, so far no such particle has been seen in the detector. These particles are very rare, if they do exist at all. So maybe it’s just a question of time, time to collect and analyse more particles in our detector.

We hope this year will be a fruitful one, with some new discovery made at CERN!