Us Canucks ain’t so dumb I guess. The university where I live runs this program
https://phas.ubc.ca/particle-nuclear-physics
The
ATLAS experiment at the
Large Hadron Collider is the world's premier high-energy collider for looking for new particles at the highest energies ever probed by accelerators. The Standard Model has several mysteries that will be probed by ATLAS. In 2012 the LHC discovered the Higgs boson that gives particles mass. Dark matter, seen in astronomical and cosmological observations, is missing from the Model, and these measurements suggest it could be produced and studied at the LHC. Grand Unified Theories that unify the known forces often predict new symmetries and forces that may be evident at LHC energies.
UBC is carrying out many searches for signs of new particles or forces as well as precision measurements of known processes. Examples of the former are searches for new long-lived particles that decay somewhere in the detector, for so-called vector-like quarks (the simplest allowed extension of the quark sector), or for particles associated to new symmetries , i.e. forces, of nature. Our measurements focus on the top quark and the Higgs boson. A common thread in our research is the use of machine learning techniques for the reconstruction and identification of particles as well as its use in the final data analyses. In addition, we are involved in both the Transition Radiation Tracker, currently in operation, and are building parts of a new all-silicon Inner Tracker (ITk), to be installed in 2026. These are both part of the central detector responsible for measuring the position of charged particles. (Colin Gay, Alison Lister, and Oliver Stelzer-Chilton, plus collaborators at TRIUMF)