World’s largest science machine faces tough question: after the Higgs boson, what next?

The heatwave sapping Europe this June does not spare CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), whose dull grey buildings give little hint of the underground that sets the lab apart from any other hive of colossal engineering on earth.

Here, in tunnels beneath the Franco-Swiss border, physicists drive protons — among the particles at the heart of every atom — to a hair below the speed of light and smash them together, reading the debris for clues to how the universe is built. At the ALICE (’A Large Ion Collider Experiment’) detector, one of four that give meaning to those collisions, scientists sit glued to monitors — the whole room not dissimilar to Hollywood renderings of an FBI nerve centre — watching the multicoloured swarms each collision leaves behind.

Somewhere in that mess, they hope, is a sign of new matter, a clue to why matter and not antimatter survived, or something that has eluded the smartest physicists probing the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.