ICHEP2016

DS: Several exciting things come to mind. I'll pick one. Detecting dark matter, or perhaps even opening the door on a whole 'dark sector' of matter would be (will be ;) a fantastic discovery. There are many ways one can go after this question, such as detecting directly the dark matter the Earth is now coasting through, producing dark sector particles in experiments like the LHC, or indirectly detecting their influence through things like neutrino oscillations.

To cheat and name a second - another huge question today is about what exactly is the dark energy.

HL: This is a great question. I think the answer is yes and no. The problem lies at the scales we are trying to probe. We have amazing accelerators like the ones at Fermilab and CERN that can generate extremely high energy particles, but we'll probably never create an accelerator that can go up to EeV energies (10^18), and we've measured cosmic rays at those energies. Beyond that, there's the Planck scale where we think quantum gravity becomes important (10²⁸⁾ which is even further. So we'll never build tools to directly probe that.

However, we can try to be smart - so there are lots of ways that physics at those scales do affect things at the scales we can reach. These are sometimes called "indirect" measurements, where understanding something at a scale we can reach actually tells you something very important about something we can't. And I think physics is a history of going back and forth between these direct probes and indirect probes.

So the optimistic answer is that when a hard barrier appears in one particular area, there will always be side channels that we can go down that still provide access to the other side.

HL: Tachyons would be pretty cool.

VM: The updated results will be unveiled tomorrow morning, stay tuned to #ichep2016 for the latest updates!!! We are working on analyzing the large dataset delivered by the LHC this year, there are also more results to come, stay tuned for updates!!!

Recap of all new results from the LHC will also be presented at the conference on Monday morning at 11:15 US Central time. That session will be webcast live for the public - follow @pressICHEP on Twitter for the URL. Warning: It's a physics presentation for physicists, so expect technical language!