Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe was a hot, dense "soup" in which sub atomic particles interacted strongly with radiation.

BBC: Pictures of the early Universe

This could shrink the size and cost of building giant accelerators, which produce sub-atomic particles.

ECONOMIST: Ultra-fast lasers

The Standard Model is a framework that explains how the known sub-atomic particles interact with each other.

BBC: Higgs boson 'hints' also seen by US lab

The loop may produce sub-atomic particles with a thousand times more energy than those in man-made accelerators.

BBC: Arches Cluster, Leicester

Each electron added to this fluid creates a ripple, and these ripples behave like fractionally charged sub-atomic particles.

ECONOMIST: The 1998 Nobel prizes

The candidates for dark matter come in two basic sorts: largish chunks, or darting, sub-atomic particles in unimaginable abundance.

ECONOMIST: The dark side of cosmology

The reason the detector is buried so deeply is to keep all but the most persistent of sub-atomic particles away from it.

ECONOMIST: Neutrinos

Prof Peter Higgs developed a theory of how other sub-atomic particles came to have substance, or mass, and published his work in 1964.

BBC: Science correspondent, BBC News

Though they did not, themselves, perform the synthesis, Dr't Hooft and Dr Veltman tidied up its mathematics to such a degree that useful predictions about the properties of unknown sub-atomic particles became possible.

ECONOMIST: The 1999 Nobel prizes