Over the past two years, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has started to directly probe a qualitatively new class of interactions, associated with the Higgs boson. These interactions, called Yukawa interactions, are unlike any other interaction that we have probed at the quantum level before.

In particular, unlike the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, they have an interaction strength that does not come in multiples of some underlying unit charge. Yukawa interactions are believed to be of fundamental importance to the world as we know it, hypothesised, for example, to be responsible for the stability of the proton, and so the universe and life as we know it.