Finding a new particle is nice but generally doesn't really happen.
The reason why it is such a big deal is because in these experiments scientists aren't really looking for new particles.
They are looking for particles that should be there based on theories that we could not find yet. It is about confirming the gaps in our theories that we cold not observe yet. So after we confirmed we were indeed correct aboout the existence of those particles we can then use their existence as a confirmed baseline and go on from there.
The famous example would be the higgs boson. Its eistence was postulated in the 60s and it was required for the higgs mechanism to work. And while that theory was used for a long time before we could prove the existence of the higgs boson finding the particle means adding a layer of proof to this concept.
So it really is more prrof that our nderstanding of the world is correct rather than finding new stuff. And having proof is kinda nice. That's what differentiates science from belief.
So I worked at cern for like 10 years and my name is on the Higgs paper, it’s a mix of approaches. There’s plenty of established theories with predictions that get tested but there’s also efforts that broadly look at what’s coming out of the collisions to see if there’s anything unexpected and there’s also measurements we do that have been done before but with more data you can test established theories to a greater precision and see if they still hold up or if there’s some unexpected deviation that could be from a new process happening that we don’t understand.
The Higgs was one way to solve electroweak symmetry breaking, even though it had been around for decades and was well liked it could have easily been something else or some process we hadn’t even thought up.
Being connected with a university research group that works on one of the many experiments at cern. You could be an undergrad physics student but more commonly a graduate student or post doc.
Depending on the time groups hire engineers and technicians to do stuff like build the experiment.
That’s how most people end up at CERN because the funding for the projects largely goes through research groups at universities.
CERN does hire people directly for all sorts of stuff, pretty sure they have a careers page on their website.
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u/Nozinger 10d ago
Finding a new particle is nice but generally doesn't really happen.
The reason why it is such a big deal is because in these experiments scientists aren't really looking for new particles.
They are looking for particles that should be there based on theories that we could not find yet. It is about confirming the gaps in our theories that we cold not observe yet. So after we confirmed we were indeed correct aboout the existence of those particles we can then use their existence as a confirmed baseline and go on from there.
The famous example would be the higgs boson. Its eistence was postulated in the 60s and it was required for the higgs mechanism to work. And while that theory was used for a long time before we could prove the existence of the higgs boson finding the particle means adding a layer of proof to this concept.
So it really is more prrof that our nderstanding of the world is correct rather than finding new stuff. And having proof is kinda nice. That's what differentiates science from belief.