Physicists face a thorny set of basic questions that do not yet have definitive answers. These questions embrace physics from the smallest to largest scale. In the 2002 report Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos: Eleven Science Questions for the New Century, the National Research Council boiled these questions down to eleven. Livermore Laboratory is involved in efforts to answer at least seven of them (see p. 11). The article beginning on p. 4 describes an experiment, spearheaded by the Laboratory, that may ultimately provide the definitive answer to the question "What constitutes the dark matter of the universe?" This experiment searches for the axion—a particle more elusive than the neutrino. The axion may be the dominant component of cosmological dark matter, which we know cannot consist of already-discovered particles.
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