Science
Particle Physics Quiz
Higgs boson, quarks, the Standard Model, and the LHC at CERN — 50 hard questions
Higgs boson, quarks, the Standard Model, and the LHC at CERN — 50 hard questions
The Higgs boson took 48 years to find — Peter Higgs predicted it in 1964 and saw it confirmed at CERN in 2012, winning the Nobel a year later. The search cost billions of dollars, required a 27-kilometre particle accelerator beneath the French-Swiss border, and involved thousands of scientists from around the world. The Higgs was the last missing piece of the Standard Model — the framework that describes all known fundamental particles and three of nature's four forces. Yet the Standard Model is far from complete: it says nothing about dark matter (27% of the universe's energy density), dark energy (68%), or gravity. This quiz covers the Standard Model's 17 particles, the LHC, Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, and the hints of new physics that may lie beyond.
Each round presents 10 randomized questions from a pool of 50, with four multiple-choice options and instant feedback after every answer. Your final score comes with a performance tier and shareable results.
You'll cover all 6 quarks and 6 leptons, protons and neutrons as composite particles, the four fundamental forces and their carrier bosons, the Higgs mechanism, the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments, the top quark discovery at Fermilab's Tevatron in 1995, neutrino oscillation and the solar neutrino problem, dark matter candidates, the muon g-2 anomaly, supersymmetry, and what might lie beyond the Standard Model.
The Higgs boson was discovered on July 4, 2012, announced jointly by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has a mass of approximately 125.1 GeV/c². Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for predicting the particle's existence in 1964.
The Standard Model is the theoretical framework describing all known elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear — excluding gravity). It contains 17 fundamental particles: 6 quarks, 6 leptons, 4 force-carrying bosons (photon, W, Z, gluon), and the Higgs boson. Developed in the 1960s–70s, it is the most precisely tested theory in science.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-kilometre circular tunnel buried beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva. It accelerates protons (and sometimes heavy ions) to near light speed and collides them at energies up to 13.6 TeV. Its four main experiments — ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE — have made numerous discoveries including the Higgs boson in 2012.
Last updated: May 2026