The Building Blocks of Our Universe: From Atoms to Dark Matter

Over the past two millennia, humanity has made tremendous progress in understanding the building blocks of the universe. While the ancient Greeks believed that "atoms" were indivisible, today we know that the smallest constituents of the universe (quarks and leptons) are at least 100 million times smaller than atoms. The properties of these known building blocks of the universe have been measured very precisely and summarized in a theory called the "Standard Model". However, there are many mysteries, such as why there are so many fundamental particles, why there is more matter than antimatter, and what "dark matter" is, which constitutes 80% of the matter in the universe. I will particularly focus on the role of particle accelerators, in particular the Large Hadron Collider.