1 Apr 2026
Mark Thomson is the newly appointed director general of CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory, and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashes particles together at almost the speed of light to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. CERN has been responsible for groundbreaking new physics, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and is a world leader in antimatter research. However, in order to probe even deeper, it must run at higher energy levels. We catch up with Thomson at an important juncture, as the LHC is due to shut down for two years for upgrades, paving the way for even more exciting physics. But is there anything left to discover? And are large particle accelerators the future of particle physics?
“There are really big questions that we don’t know the answer to,” says Thomson. “Big questions like dark matter. Is the Higgs boson a fundamental particle? Does the Higgs boson interact with the dark matter? At some point, we are going to find answers to some of these really, really big questions.”
00:00 Introduction
00:33 The future of science at CERN
01:42 What really happens at CERN
04:35 Who is Mark Thomson?
05:38 How has particle physics changed?
09:58 The search for Dark Matter and Antimatter
11:40 The LHC upgrade
17:18 Antimatter research
23:30 The future of particle physics
25:47 Future Circular Collider
32:10 The collider the end all colliders
35:41 CERN collaborative science
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