The CERN particle accelerator that will breathe new life into physics

TO GET to Edda Gschwendtner’s experiment, you enter a small, brutalist building at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. You head into the lift and descend 50 metres into a vast underground chamber. After a series of yellow security doors, you must traverse a kilometre along a downward-sloping tunnel – which is why Gschwendtner typically uses one of the small white bikes parked inside the doors.

She is developing a promising kind of particle accelerator that might help us find new physics.…