What is the Zeptoverse and what did Harry Cliff's team detect at CERN?

The Zeptoverse is the name physicists give to distances about 100 billion times smaller than an atom. Dr Harry Cliff of the University of Cambridge has detected signals from that scale at the Large Hadron Collider, the smallest distances ever probed. The result matters because dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe, is thought to interact with ordinary matter at this scale. Cliff says more data is needed to properly explore it.

• The work came from CERN's LHCb experiment and was led from Cambridge.
• Cliff works in the Cambridge lab where J.J. Thomson discovered the electron about 130 years ago.

▸In their words

“We're knocking on the door of this Zeptoverse, this tiny, tiny world.” Harry Cliff · at 26:44 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Global News Podcast (2026-11-03). Read the whole episode summary →

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