Undergrad What are the most important phenomena that the Standard Model can't explain?

[AndreasC]

Research motivated by dark matter and dark energy phenomena observations and constraints

That was one of my main instincts. But it seems like in recent decades it hasn't been the main focus, why do you think that is?

 

[ohwilleke]

That was one of my main instincts. But it seems like in recent decades it hasn't been the main focus, why do you think that is?

There are 34,672 papers at arVix that concern dark matter and those papers are found in almost every conceivably relevant subfield. It has definitely received a lot of attention. Astronomers have more to say than physicists in many other subfields, but I would strongly disagree that it hasn't been one of the main focuses in recent decades.

Indeed, as the LHC and prior successes of the SM have dried up other opportunities to discover new physics that still seemed possible a few decades ago, it has increasingly moved to center stage.

Of course, the latest new toy for physicists as a community, the LHC, is excellent for investigating the properties of the Higgs boson, and only a marginal improvement in searching for dark matter, so this and hadronic physics and lepton universality violations and a few anomalous experimental results there (most of which haven't panned out) have also taken up some of the spotlight, and there are only so many times that the public can get interested in null results from direct dark matter detection experiments or the like, even when those investigations produce lots of new scientific papers.

 

[AndreasC]

Astronomers have more to say than physicists in many other subfields, but I would strongly disagree that it hasn't been one of the main focuses in recent decades.

Yes, I worded it poorly. While there is a lot of attention paid to dark matter, the impression I get (which may be wrong) is that it isn't the main focus of physicists working on advancing the foundations of physics and going beyond the standard model. At least that is the impression I had, but I'm not basing it on anything concrete . I guess it makes sense that things have shifted after all the null results.