Cern agrees to ‘dark matter’ study

The research board at the European particle physics laboratory Cern has given the go-ahead for a large-scale experiment that will look for evidence of hard-to-find subatomic particles.

The Forward Search Experiment, or Faser, will install detectors along the lab’s Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator to look for the exotic particles, Cern announced on 5 March.

Some of the particles are associated with “dark matter”, which has been predicted in theories but has still not been definitively proved to exist, Cern said. Dark matter is so named because it is thought not to interact with the electromagnetic force and so cannot be detected with light.