Scientists to hunt mysterious ‘ghost’ particles

New instrument will be a thousand times more sensitive to such particles than previous devices. It will smash particles into a hard surface to detect them instead of against each other like Cern’s main device the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The current theory of particle physics is called the Standard Model. Everything in the Universe is made up of a family of 17 particles.

Some are mixed up in different combinations to make up the larger, but still incredibly small, particles. They are thought to be phantom doppelgangers of the 17 particles of the Standard Model. If they exist, they are hard to detect because they very rarely interact with the world we know. The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) will crash particles into a big block of material.

This means that all the particles are smashed into smaller bits - rather than some of them. The theory is that the ghost particles can, very rarely, disintegrate into Standard Model particles, and these can be picked up by detectors. The hunt for ghost particles requires specially adapted equipment. With normal experiments, new particles can be detected up to a metre from the collision.

But the ghost particles can remain invisible and travel several tens or even hundreds of meters before they disintegrate and reveal themselves. The project’s ghostbuster-in-chief, Prof Andrey Golutvin of Imperial College London said that the experiment marks a new era in the search for hidden particles. The particles are right under our noses, but we have never been able to see them because of the way they interact. So SHiP’s detectors are placed much further away.

Prof Mitesh Patel of Imperial College described the new approach as ‘ingenious’ Cern’s Large Hadron Collider has been searching for the missing 95% of the Universe since it was completed in 2008 at a cost of £3. 75bn. So far it hasn’t found any non-Standard Model particles, so the plan is to build a machine that is three times larger and much more powerful. The SHiP experiment is scheduled to start looking for new particles in 2030.

It will be around a hundred times cheaper at around £100m. Its planned start date is sometime in the mid-2040s, though it won’t be at its full new particle-hunting potential until 2070.