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Most of the Universe is invisible, but the invisibles determine our everyday existence. There is an invisible energy field, related to the Higgs boson, that provides mass. There is dark matter that holds our galaxy together – thanks to its gravitational pull, but we have yet to detect it in the laboratory and understand what it is made of. The ghostly neutrinos that barely talk to us can account for only an insignificant fraction of a special type of dark matter, yet they are important players today and through cosmic history. In a mine two kilometers beneath Sudbury, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory revealed that neutrinos change identity as they travel and therefore have mass, a discovery recognized by the 2015 Nobel Prize for Art McDonald. The CERN Large Hadron Collider may produce signals of dark matter, new forces of nature or cousins of the Higgs boson, while deep-underground laboratories like SNOLAB are searching for the identity of the bulk of dark matter and the secrets of neutrinos. Discoveries from experiments and observatories around the world are needed to pull together a coherent picture of the invisible world and possibly explain why there is matter rather than nothing – and why we exist.

Prof. Marcela Carena is the Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. She is also jointly appointed as a particle physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and a physics professor at the University of Chicago, where she has been a member of both the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.

Prof. Carena is a renowned particle physicist who has advanced our understanding of fundamental mysteries of science related to sourcing the mass of the fundamental particles in nature, the origin of matter in the universe and the nature of dark matter. Her most recent research program explores particle physics and quantum information to tackle problems of quantum theory in the early universe.

Prof. Carena is an original co-author of the Status of the Higgs Boson review of the Particle Data Book. In 2022 Carena was honored as a U.S. DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow. In 2010 Carena won the Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She was a staff member and a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN and was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship of the European Commission to conduct research at DESY.