https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics#High-energy/particle_physics
There’s work ongoing on figuring out why neutrinos have mass. What’s in dark matter is also still a big mystery, and there’s experiments ongoing to pin down a few miscellaneous interactions that just work a bit funny.
Beyond that, there’s all kinds of ideas about very high energy physics: unification of the three forces of nature, what happened during the big bang, supersymmetry, string theory and so on. At this point it’s looking like no particle accelerator that fits on Earth will be strong enough to find anything like that, though.
Well we confirmed the higgs boson in 2012, so… all the stuff we’ve been working on in the last 14 years?
I haven’t really been keeping up with the particle physics community, what is the “next big thing” they’re looking for? In lieu of a single “next big thing” that would be comparable to the Higgs boson, what kind of things are they really looking for at the LHC these days?
Antimatter and finding the source of the asymmetry?
They drove a van with 90 anti-protons around the CERN campus a couple weeks back. Did you mean dark matter?
I know that we can make it, doesn’t mean it’s fully understood. I also know that in a sense it’s nothing really special - but still, why do we live in a matter universe?
Or maybe they’ve really been looking for the van with antimatter for the last fourteen years.
Some desperate delivery person crying in relief when they finally find the delivery entrance, and the scientists: “well, now we can actually start this whole operation”
Supersymmetry is probably the next big thing.
Such particles might have ridiculously high energies that the LHC has not yet been able to reach, and if there actually is a higher-level particle zoo like the Standard Model, it might be that things like Dark Matter are part of, if not all of it.
Form what I’ve heard, it’s less “might” and more “probably do”, and the particle accelerator you’d need to find them if they exist all the way up there would be the size of the whole solar system, or something. Basically, high-energy physics is not a good career path right now.
Sure lets do a list in case some other person reads this they can add to it and we might be able to educate a person or people?
We already found the Higgs.
satan particle
I don’t really know why you’re asking it phrasing quite that way, but the Higgs Boson was discovered numerous years ago. You probably meant to say now that we have… it just read as though it was something yet to be achieved.
What’s so beautiful about it is that it was such a testament to the scientific method because it was established that it would have to exist to explain observed phenomena, and then it was identified. Oftentimes things are discovered and then explained/defined etc. but science can work to establish such reliable knowledge that we knew it had to be there, and then we found it. Kind of like some archaeological discoveries. Just some of the beauty of science.
Specifically in particle physics, since the discovery of the Higgs-Boson there hasn’t been much. The HB represented the last of the expected particles in the Standard Model. Proponents of string theory expected to find more fundamental particles in colliders, but those searches have turned up empty.
That said, it’s not like particle physicists have nothing to do, they just have to investigate some more subtle phenomenon to earn their paycheck rather than discover new particles.
Levitating cars