The universe is made of stories, not of atoms

In the magnetic field that surrounds Earth, thousands of satellites are in orbit, providing the basis for GPS navigation and satellite internet. The number of launched satellites is growing rapidly, with over 1000 launched in 2022 alone, but they are vulnerable. A strong geomagnetic storm can knock satellites out of orbit, causing them to crash down to Earth. In this talk, I will uncover how space weather happens, how it affects our technologies and what we can do about it.

Dark matter makes up eighty percent of every galaxy’s mass. We can see its effects, but its composition remains a mystery. Axions are a promising candidate. These hypothetical particles formed shortly after the Big Bang, congregated in galaxies, and now pass with barely a trace through ordinary matter. To find out if axions exist, the tiny signals they create interacting with our detectors need amplifying. This talk explains how quantum mechanics sets an ultimate limit on the sensitivity that any amplifier can achieve - and how quantum technology also gives us a way to evade that limit.

Saturn is a bright neighbour of ours in the night sky, known for its icy rings. But this gas giant also displays powerful ultraviolet auroras at its polar regions, invisible to the naked eye. Dr Joe Kinrade, a research fellow at Lancaster University’s Space & Planetary Physics group, presents a tourist’s guide to Saturn’s auroras and how we image them from afar using the Hubble Space Telescope and Cassini spacecraft missions.

The Higgs boson discovery at the LHC at CERN has been in the making for 48 years. It is a story of bright ideas, many puzzle pieces that finally fit together, many failed attempts and finally the discovery, the crowning success of perseverance. This talk will highlight the essential role of the Higgs boson in our understanding of physics laws, why it is so exceptional and how it was finally discovered.