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Asked by anon-217573 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 10 Jun 2019.
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Philippe Gambron answered on 10 Jun 2019:
I am working on methods to make very large calculations go faster on a computer. I would not talk about a discovery since it will just allow other people to make better simulations.
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Harrison Prosper answered on 10 Jun 2019:
I’ve been very fortunate to have had the chance to already contribute to three major discoveries: the gluon in 1979 (at DESY, Hamburg, Germany), the top quark in 1995 (at Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, USA), and the Higgs boson in 2012 (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland). I joke with my friends and colleagues that I’d like to contribute to one more major discovery before I call it quits. The one thing I would really like to answer before I retire is this: Is dark matter actually made up of subatomic particles, or is it something else? In spite of what you might see on the web, we have not actually proven that dark matter consists of particles; that is just a working hypothesis. If indeed dark matter consists of particles and they are particles that can be created at the LHC, I would love to discover this.
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Savannah Clawson answered on 10 Jun 2019:
It is my dream to contribute to any sort of discovery in science – at the moment my work is mainly trying to set limits on the science that we have already discovered just to check that it behaves exactly as we think it should. The discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 was the last missing particle of the “Standard Model” of particle physics to be discovered so a lot of people ask what is left to find! However, we know that the Standard Model cannot be the final story as there are so many things around us that it doesn’t describe! At the moment, no one can find a way to make the physics that rules that particles of the Standard Model agree with the theory of gravity – it just doesn’t work! We also have absolutely no idea what over 95 % of our universe is made of and we just give it the name “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” – there are lots of theories about what these could be but we still don’t know. I just hope that we get some answers to what they are in my lifetime – if I can’t work it out, it will be up to you guys as the scientists of the future 😉
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Edoardo Vescovi answered on 11 Jun 2019: last edited 11 Jun 2019 6:59 pm
My research is purely theoretical and has nothing to do with experiments or models that describe nature. Instead, the focus shifts to simpler models of fictitious universes that can be completely understood and solved, given little information on the particles in them. The story doesn’t begin with the outcome of an experiment and ends with tweaking the model accordingly, but the other way around. We choose particles and interactions, then calculate the result of an imaginary experiment. It’s imaginary because on a scratchpad.
The reason is that these models are far easier than nature, more symmetric, have less numbers to adjust (like masses and electric charges). Simplicity means that many quantities are calculated without approximations or measurements. We want to use some calculations and techniques to say something — even not with high precision — on the behaviour of real particles and their collisions.
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