What if there was a universe with a totally different set of physics laws that existed in parallel with ours? Hidden Sectors are a popular extension to the Standard Model of Particle physics. The Standard Model does an excellent job of describing the results of modern experiments at colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, but fails to accommodate recent discoveries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and, even, neutrino masses. Hidden Sectors are a common class of extensions to the Standard Model. I'll discuss their general features, how we search for them, covering some of the technical aspects of modern particle physics searches.

Gordon Watts is Professor of Physics at the University of Washington.