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Asked by anon-267417 on 5 Nov 2020.
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Adrien Chauvet answered on 5 Nov 2020:
You actually look at how it interacts with other things.
If you’re asking about “how to discover new particles?”, then you use detectors… with are themselves made out of materials with which you expect your new particle to interact.
For example, if you try to find photons, you can use a CCD camera: by hitting the detector, the photon will liberate an electron that you can catch.
If you try to find dark matter particles, some research groups are actually looking at how it (may) affect the core electronic levels of some atoms…
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Daisy Shearer answered on 8 Nov 2020:
By formulating theories and doing experiments! There are a few ways I could interpret your question:
Discovering new elements: nuclear physicists have discovered lots of new elements in the periodic table by doing nuclear reactions, often using particle accelerators.
Discovering particles: There are lots of ways to discover new particles but the most well-known is probably using a particle collider like the ones at CERN. They smash different particles together and study what happens which has resulted in them finding evidence of new particles, such as the Higg’s boson.
Discovering new states of matter: New types of matter like superfluids and Bose-Einstein Condensates have been discovered through experiments and theories. In my own work, I encounter a state called ‘a quantum Hall state’ quite often which is quantum mechanical in its nature and it makes electrons behave really weirdly. Who knows what other exotic types of matter we might find in the future!
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