Question: Apart from using the Large Hedron Collider in CERN, is there another otehr way you can study or find out about sub-particles? Is there a less... explosion inducing way of doing so?

Steve Marsden answered on 10 Mar 2016:

That’s a really good question! There’s a whole zoo of sub-atomic particles that we want to study. Many of these particles don’t exist normally, and haven’t existed since a split second after the big bang. The best way of studying these is thus to recreate the conditions, and so make these particles pop into existence for a brief instance. This process is performed in the LHC to allow us to study them.

But it isn’t the only way. We know that there are particles that we haven’t yet discovered in colliders like the LHC. The most prominent of these are dark matter. Dark matter is a particle (or set of particles) that are stable, and pass through regular matter. We know that they must exist because of how they interact gravitationally with the visible matter in galaxies. By looking at how galaxies behave, we can study certain properties of the particles. This form of study is very limited however, and we probably won’t truly understand what dark matter is until we manage to create it in a collision experiment.

There are also particles that we do know of, that collision experiments cannot study. The prime example of this is neutrinos. These are almost massless particles which can travel through normal matter, only interacting very occasionally. Because of how little they interact our knowledge of them is very limited. In order to learn more about them we have giant detects detectors buried underground that attempt to measure the neutrinos after they’ve passed through the Earth. These are far less spectacular experiments in terms of explosions, but their results are just as vital to our understanding of the universe. In fact there are far more of these experiments than there are collision experiments, and currently there are over 20 in operation.

Ultimately, for some particles we know of no better way of studying them that running high energy colliders. For other particles, colliders are useless, and running less explosive experiments is necessary.