With this lecture, you will be able to gain insight into the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider as well as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Gagnon will explain the fundamental components of matter according to the contemporary, mainly theoretical model, the so-called Standard Model. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 has added further credence to the Standard Model.

Nevertheless, the Standard model still only contains ‘visible matter’. In other words, all the stars and galaxies we can see. However, it does not incorporate any ‘dark matter’, a mysterious kind of matter, which accounts for at least a fifth of the universe while it remains completely unknown to us.

What is dark matter? And what impact does foundational research have on our life and why is it so important?

Pauline Gagnon completed her PhD in particle physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1993. She then started her research at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, and was a senior research scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016.