Lisa Randall: prediction

Transcript context

…Maybe let’s zoom out and look at the standard model of particle physics. How does dark matter fit into it? First of all, what is it? Can you explain what the standard model is? The standard model of particle physics is basically it tells us about nature’s most basic elements and their interactions. It’s the substructure as far as we understand it. If you look at atoms, we know they have nuclei and electrons, nuclei have protons and neutrons in them, protons and neutrons have particles called quarks that are held together by something called the strong force. They interact through the strong force, the strong nuclear force. There’s something called the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. Basically, all those particles and their interactions describe many, many things we understand. That’s the standard model. We now know about the Higgs boson, which is associated with how elementary particles get their mass. That piece of the puzzle has also been completed. We also know that there are a weird array of masses of elementary particles. There’s not just the up and down quark, but there are heavier versions of the up and down quark. Charm and strange, top and bottom. There’s not just the electron, there’s a muon and a tau. There are particles called neutrinos, which are under intense study now, which are partnered with the leptons through the weak interactions. We really do know these basic elements and we know the forces. When we’re doing particle physics experiments, we can usually even ignore gravity except in exceptional cases that we can talk about. Those are the basic elements in their interactions. Dark matter stands outside that, it’s not interacting through those forces. When we look at the world around us, we don’t usually see the effects of dark matter. It’s because there’s so much of it that we do and it doesn’t have those forces that we know about. The standard model has worked spectacularly well. It’s been tested to a high degree of precision. People are still testing it. One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations. Those deviations are critical because they can tell us what underlies the standard model, which is what we really want to see next. Where can you find the places where the standard model breaks down? What are the places you can see those tiny little deviations?…

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