On a Collision Course

About this episode

Breakthroughs around the detection of cosmic neutrinos — the “ghost” particles that may reveal why matter, not antimatter, fills the universe — recently earned a physicist the Nobel Prize in Physics. But one group of neutrino hunters isn’t waiting for supernovae to churn up these high-energy particles. A massive new experiment that spans three states will create neutrinos and fire them into liquid argon to better understand their mysterious behavior. And after the better part of a century, scientists may finally have glimpsed the primary component of nearly all matter: dark matter. Are we close to understanding what it is? Finally, we glimpse the proton-smashing at the Large Hadron Collider as it hints at undiscovered physics and puts a stress test on the Standard Model. Guests: Kate Shaw – experimental particle physicist at the University of Sussex who works on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, DUNE Kimberly Palladino – astrophysicist, professor of physics at the University of Oxford, and the project scientist for LUX- ZEPLIN an international collaboration searching for dark matter Harry Cliff – particle physicist at the University of Cambridge and a researcher