Other, similarly mysterious ratios are found among quarks, while neutrinos may even be massless. The Standard Model is unable to explain these masses, and a major task for particle physicists is to uncover the origin of mass. The present 'answer' to these questions is provided by the subtle 'Higgs' mechanism which suggests that particles acquire mass by interacting with a force field, the Higgs field, which is everywhere present. This is exactly the energy range which the LHC has been designed to explore and whatever the Higgs mechanism is, the LHC will surely reveal it, opening up an entirely new era in our understanding of Nature. Finding the solution to the mystery of mass is not the only discovery within the LHC's reach.
Astronomical observations show that there is more matter in existence than has yet been seen.
Shining objects such as the Earth, all of the planets and all of the stars only add up to about one tenth of existing matter. The other nine-tenths we call 'Dark Matter'. One explanation for Dark Matter envisages the existence of stable, as yet undiscovered, particles and the most recent results from LEP suggest that a new family of particles may exist at precisely the energy which the LHC will explore. The discovery of these new, 'supersymmetric' particles could explain what the vast majority of our Universe is made of. At the time of the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in identical amounts.