Particle physics is the study of the most fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that govern them. It asks what the universe is built from at its smallest scale, quarks, leptons, bosons, and the handful of forces that hold them together or tear them apart, and it tests those answers inside machines like the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are smashed together at nearly the speed of light to see what falls out. The Standard Model, the field's great unifying theory, has predicted decades of experimental results with extraordinary precision, yet it leaves real questions unanswered: why matter outnumbers antimatter, what dark matter is made of, and whether a deeper, more complete theory is still waiting to be found. This page collects Astrinova's reporting on the field, from its foundational ideas to its newest experimental results.
