Enter Particle Fever. The new documentary opens tomorrow in New York, and aims to demystify the years of LHC research that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle—as well as make it exciting for audiences to watch.

In addition to teaching UIUC undergraduates, he spent years working on plans for the International Linear Collider and is part of an experiment called Mu2e at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), 200 kilometers to the north in Batavia, Illinois, that is looking for the morphing of muons into electrons.

Could the tunnels we drilled for a collider in Texas house a Higgs factory?

While the world’s largest circular particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – will continue operation for the next few years, scientists have already started the conversation to build a much bigger, post-LHC circular accelerator.

If we want to continue to probe the structure of matter, to understand what the smallest constituents of nature are and how they interact, we have to think big and plan for the long term. Possibilities include machines that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider, and neutrino beams crossing half a continent.

In the shorter term, the International Linear Collider, which will smash electrons together instead of protons to investigate dark energy and multiple dimensions, will be completed around 2026. The future of high-energy physics is bright indeed. I have a feeling that, over the next 20 years or so, the universe is going to be forced to cough up some very juicy secrets indeed.