“The core of the story,” said David Curtin , a physicist at the University of Maryland, “is that the LHC could be making particles which are totally invisible, which decay some distance away from the production point, whether it’s millimeters or many kilometers, and which are connected at the most fundamental level to some of the most important theoretical mysteries that we have.”

Such hypothetical particles are called “long-lived,” because their lifetimes would far exceed those that the LHC was designed to detect. If the LHC is indeed producing these particles, then it’s likely that some are fleeing the accelerator’s underground tunnel, shooting up through the earth, and potentially exploding like fireworks in the sky above the nearby farm fields as they decay back into ordinary matter.

Read the full article on the Quanta magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-hidden-higgs-could-reveal-our-universes-dark-sector-20170926/