The Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics (CoEPP) has opened at Melbourne University with the objective of helping to answer primary questions about the origin of the universe.

 

The centre has created new research groups at the Universities of Adelaide and Sydney as well as augmenting existing groups at Melbourne and Monash Universities.

 

The Centre, which is being provided with over $25 million through the ARC Centre of Excellence scheme, will study central questions in terascale physics, such as:  

 

  • What generates the masses of the fundamental particles? Is it the Higgs boson or something else?
  • If the Higgs boson exists, what solves the theoretical difficulties? Is it Supersymmetry, extra hidden dimensions or something else?
  • What is dark matter and dark energy?
  • How is gravity incorporated into the Standard Model? Can all the particles and interactions be described by a single Grand Unified Theory?
  • How do quarks bind to form protons, neutrons, pions and other hadrons?
  • How do neutrinos gain mass and why are those masses so small?
  • Why is the universe filled with matter but essentially no antimatter?

 

The centre will contribute towards the ATLAS experiment which involves around 3000 scientists from 37 countries. ATLAS is the general-purpose detector used at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

 

Further information is available at the CoEPP website