Wow, thanks for the questions!
- What are the top few things being worked on in your field and what’s your take from an Insider’s perspective- any big developments seemingly imminent on the horizon?
I’ll start with this one, as it might provide background for other answers.
Large Hadron Collider
The last century of particle physics research (though it certainly wasn’t called that the whole time) had led us to a predictive framework – the Standard Model of particle physics – that works extremely well and is even rather elegant in certain respects. Two points about the Standard Model (SM): (1) it predicts the existence of a particle, or set of closely related particles, that hasn’t been seen yet (namely, the Higgs) and (2) the parts of the model that are not elegant are really not elegant.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is targeting both of these issues. In the SM, the Higgs mass is related to many quantities we have already observed (e.g., quark masses), and you can reverse engineer what the Higgs mass has to be, given all the measured numbers. The answer: somewhere between 110 GeV and 250 GeV, give or take, and definitely light enough to be seen by the LHC.
As for the inelegance: the model has a lot of “fine-tuning” in it. That is, certain parameters that are nominally on equal footing are observed to be vastly different in value (like, 1-part-in-10[sup]30[/sup] different in some cases.) The model still works, but these features are suggestive of new physics that we are missing. One attractive explanation is called “supersymmetry”, which actually predicts such ugly discrepancies. Supersymmetry requires a new class of particles that the LHC experiments will search for.
(Aside: I’m happy to hold sidebars on jargon like GeV or whatever. After all, answering questions is what this thread is all about!)
Cosmology
About a quarter of the universe seems to be made up of matter that we cannot see and whose nature we are unsure of. This “dark matter” could be new fundamental particles, and many experiments are searching for them. Supersymmetry (above) offers good candidates, and you can look for these directly at the LHC. On the other hand, you can try to detect dark matter particles just floating around in free space. There are many groups doing this latter type of experiment. The set up is physically rather small – you could put it on a table top, if it weren’t for all the secondary systems like shielding and cryogenics.
The universe also seems to made up of matter, not antimatter. We’ve got to explain that.
Neutrinos
Most neutrino experiments these days relate in some way to the fact that neutrinos have mass, a relatively modern revelation. When you give them mass, the quark side of the SM and the neutrino side have similar structure, but the measured parameters don’t come out similar at all. Neutrinos are way less massive than quarks (factor of 10[sup]7[/sup] or more) and they much more easily change identities with one another. (Detail for advanced readers: the unitary transformation that maps the free-Hamiltonian quark eigenstates to the weak-interaction quark eigenstates is nearly diagonal. This transformation for neutrinos, in contrast, is nowhere near diagonal, with some mixings near maximal.)
A variety of novel phenomena become possible when you give neutrinos mass, and lots of folks are probing these. One example is a new mode of nuclear decay (“neutrinoless double beta decay”), which would be rare (if it happens at all) but which would tell us some deep things about the nature of neutrinos. It could also be the case that neutrinos have the properties needed to explain the matter/antimatter imbalance of the universe.
Precision tests
More groups than you might imagine are doing precision particle physics. The idea is simple enough: if you can get a huge gain in precision on some measured quantity, and that more precise number deviates from prediction, profit! (Of course, if the prediction itself is the limiting factor, better measurements don’t help.) These are often (but not always) smaller and cheaper experiments with clever designs. Some areas: strength of gravity, antimatter properties, magnetic moments of fundamental particles, violation of parity or charge*parity symmetry, rare process searches.
This is certainly a partial list, but I’ll move on…