The purpose of MoEDAL is to look out for any monopoles that might be created in collisions inside the LHC. It could also potentially detect certain "stable massive particles" that are predicted by theories beyond the Standard Model. If it's successful in finding any of these particles, MoEDAL could help to resolve fundamental questions such as the existence of other dimensions or the nature of dark matter. Climate science

The climate experiment is called CLOUD, which gives a strong hint of what it's about, although the name stands for Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets. Earth is under constant bombardment by cosmic rays, and it's been theorized that these play a role in cloud formation by seeding tiny water droplets. It isn't an easy process to study in the real atmosphere with real cosmic rays, so CERN is creating its own cosmic rays with the accelerator. These are then fired into an artificial atmosphere, where their effects can be studied much more closely. Making antimatter First introduced during the late 1960s and early 1970s, supersymmetry looked promising due to its mathematical elegance and its ability to explain why gravity appears to be much weaker than the other fundamental forces and to resolve other mysteries such as dark matter. I started on ATLAS for my PhD research. I was developing new pixel sensors to improve the measurement of particles as they pass through our detector. It's really important to make them resistant to radiation damage, which is a big concern when you put the sensors close to the particle collisions. Since then, I've had the opportunity to work on a number of different projects, such as understanding how the Higgs boson and the top quark interact with each other. Now I'm applying machine learning algorithms to our data to look for hints of dark matter. One of the biggest mysteries in physics right now is, what is 85% of the matter in our universe? We call it dark matter, but we don't actually know much about it! Chen-Ning Yang, a Nobel-winning particle physicist, brought the debate to public attention in China in 2016. In a widely shared blogpost, he criticized the quest for signs of supersymmetry by way of a new supercollider as “a guess on top of a guess.” He also expressed his worry that the project will have a negative effect on the funding for other research fields, especially those that “need pressing solutions, such as in environment, education and health.” Those are but two ideas for how a supercollider could pose a threat, and there are more. We could list all of the possible dangers, but there remains something more unsettling to keep in mind: Since we don't know what happens to matter when we start studying it at energies only possible with the LHC (that is, of course, the point of building the accelerator), maybe something will happen that was never predicted. And, given our ignorance, maybe that unexpected phenomenon might be dangerous.Sharing the same underground cavern as LHCb is a smaller instrument called MoEDAL, which stands for "Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC". While most CERN experiments are designed to study known particles, this one is aimed at discovering hitherto unknown ones that lie outside the present Standard Model. A monopole, for example, would be a magnetized particle consisting only of a north pole without a south one, or vice versa. Such particles have long been hypothesized, but never observed. And it is that last worry that could have potentially been so troubling to the LHC's creators. When you don't know what you don't know, you … well … you don't know. Such a question requires a powerful and definitive answer. And here it is… Why the LHC is totally safe With LHC's magnets "trained" and the proton beams more powerful than ever, the LHC will be able to create collisions at higher energies than ever before, expanding the possibilities for what scientists using the upgraded equipment might find. Two of the four collision points around the circumference of the LHC are occupied by large general-purpose detectors. These include the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which can be thought of as a giant 3D camera, snapping images of particles up to 40 million times per second.

Particles are smashed together with such enormous energies that the collisions create a cascade of new particles — most of them extremely short-lived. The important thing for scientists is to work out what all these particles are, and that's not an easy task. To give a sense of scale, the LHC collides particles together with a total energy of 13 trillion (or tera) electron volts of energy (TeV). The highest-energy cosmic ray ever recorded was an unfathomable 300,000,000 TeV of energy. Now, cosmic rays of that prodigious energy are very rare. The energy of more common cosmic rays is much lower. But here's the point: Cosmic rays of the energy of a single LHC beam hit the Earth about half a quadrillion times per second. No collider necessary. Aad, Georges, et al. " The ATLAS experiment at the CERN large hadron collider." Journal of instrumentation 3.S08003 (2008).Further, we can expand the number of cosmic targets to include neutron stars, which consist of matter so dense that whatever potentially dangerous thing we might consider will stop dead in the neutron star right after it is made. And yet the sun and the neutron stars we see in the universe all are still there. They haven't disappeared. Safety assured! Away from the LHC, there are other facilities at CERN that are doing equally important research. Linking particle physics to climate science may not be an obvious step, yet that's what one experiment is doing at CERN's Proton Synchrotron. This is a smaller and less sophisticated accelerator than the LHC, but it's still capable of doing useful work. Mind you, there is zero evidence that strangelets are anything other than an idea born in the fertile imagination of a theoretical physicist. But, if they exist, the claim is that a strangelet is essentially a catalyst. If it impacts ordinary matter, it will make the matter it touches also turn into a strangelet. Following the idea to its logical conclusion, if a strangelet were made on Earth, it would result in the entire planet collapsing down into a ball of matter made of strangelets … kind of like turning the Earth into an exotic version of neutron star. Essentially a strangelet can be thought of as a subatomic zombie; one that turns everything it touches into a fellow strangelet zombie. If you see a news headline about exotic new subatomic particles, the chances are the discovery was made at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located near Geneva in Switzerland. Like the unchartered territories that medieval mapmakers filled with fantastic beasts, the frontiers of physics have been filled with a wealth of hypotheses for what may lurk in the darkness. And in science, the only way to confirm or disprove these hypotheses is to gather more data -- data from better telescopes and microscopes and, perhaps, a brand-new, even bigger supercollider.