Dawn of a new era

Highly ambitious scientific experiments around the world are currently unveiling Nature’s innermost secrets. On July 4, 2012 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a new high-energy particle, revealing information about the basic laws of the universe. This discovery heralds a new and extremely exciting era in high-energy physics. At the same time the cosmic frontier is being explored by the Planck mission of ESA’s Horizon Program. Planck will lead to unprecedented heights in the understanding of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure. Many more state-of-the-art experiments are searching for direct or indirect traces of a mysterious form of non-luminous matter. This dark matter is five times more abundant than atoms, the bright matter. We aim to:

Discover the origins of the bright and dark side of the universe.

Any known force of nature is described by a gauge theory. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the force responsible for the very existence of protons and neutrons, is a time-honoured example of a colored theory. It provides the bulk of all the luminous matter. Therefore we also have the ambition to:

Illuminate colored gauge theories of fundamental interactions.

Progress on colored dynamics will unleash a vast number of new fundamental theories that can describe the dark and bright fabric of the universe.

These are the most ambitious goals in particle physics and cosmology. To achieve these goals we will:

Capitalise on the new discoveries to select the new fundamental models of Nature
Tackle colored dynamics via supercomputers and ingenious analytic methods
Search for a unified and coherent answer to the dark and bright origin of the universe by integrating and coordinating the efforts of the cosmology, particle physics and dark matter units at the centre and their international partners.

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