A brief history of the universe
Image by Dr J Rademacker

The European Research Council has recently awarded Dr Jonas Rademacker of Bristol’s particle physics group a €1.4M start-up grant to make precision measurements of the subtle differences between matter and the mirror-image of anti-matter, known as charge parity (CP) violation, using innovative methods developed by Bristol’s flavour physics group. This research aims to break the Standard Model of particle physics and glimpse at what lies beyond.

The successful but unloved Standard Model of particle physics describes the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions with impressive precision. It has passed numerous experimental tests; a spectacular example is its prediction of a heavy spin-0 particle, the Higgs boson, a good candidate for which was recently discovered at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Yet it cannot be complete. It has problems of self-consistency and fails to address such fundamental issues as the nature of the 96% of the universe we cannot see, gravity, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe which requires new sources of CP violation (see Figure).