Perimeter Institute’s Executive Director Marcela Carena brought the invisible universe into focus at the Thirteenth Annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP2025), where she delivered the keynote public outreach lecture.
The LHCP conference first began in 2013 when two international conferences – ‘Physics at Large Hadron Collider Conference’ and ‘Hadron Collider Physics Symposium’ - joined together.
It brings together researchers from around the world to review results in collider physics, with an emphasis on stimulating discussions between experimentalists and theorists. Topics covered during the conference include the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson, heavy quark physics, and heavy-ion physics.
In her public lecture, Carena shone a spotlight on the unseen forces that govern our day-to-day lives.
“Most of the universe is invisible, but the invisibles determine our everyday existence,” she said in her abstract.
“There is an invisible energy field, related to the Higgs boson, that provides mass. There is dark matter that holds our galaxy together, but researchers have yet to detect it in the laboratory. We have only recently learned how to detect gravity waves - ripples in spacetime - coming from the far corners of the cosmos, and possibly from dramatic events in the early Universe.”
Results from the CERN Large Hadron collider and other experiments are needed to pull together a coherent picture of the invisible world and explain the first instants of the Big Bang, she said.
Carena’s lecture, titled “The Invisible Universe – from the Higgs boson to dark matter” was delivered on May 8th, 2025, at the GIS NTU Convention Centre within National Taiwan University.
About PI
Perimeter Institute is the world’s largest research hub devoted to theoretical physics. The independent Institute was founded in 1999 to foster breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of our universe, from the smallest particles to the entire cosmos. Research at Perimeter is motivated by the understanding that fundamental science advances human knowledge and catalyzes innovation, and that today’s theoretical physics is tomorrow’s technology. Located in the Region of Waterloo, the not-for-profit Institute is a unique public-private endeavour, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada, that enables cutting-edge research, trains the next generation of scientific pioneers, and shares the power of physics through award-winning educational outreach and public engagement.
