It’s been said that a finely tuned ear knows the size and shape of a piano by merely listening to the instrument’s notes. An international team of physicists has now devised an analogous approach to detect the universe’s hidden particles at high energies—opening a potential pathway for discovering new laws of physics.

The work, which will appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, outlines how effective field theory (EFT) coefficients, which quantify how new laws of physics would influence known particle interactions at low energies, can be transformed into information about the nature of these hidden particles. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the scientists note, already searches for values of EFT coefficients through its measurement of particle collisions, thereby providing ready-to-use data for this approach.

“Like deducing the shape and mechanism of a piano from the sound of its notes, this breakthrough provides the means to use collider measurements to deduce the details of hidden particles at high energies,” explains Grant Remmen, the James Arthur Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University and one of the paper’s authors. “This solves a classic open problem in particle physics in an elegant and useful way, providing powerful and sharp mathematical tools that bridge high-energy theory and particle physics experiments.”