The universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, as if driven by an unheard melody — this invisible force was dubbed dark energy. The discovery earned a Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, yet its inner workings remain a mystery.

Usually, dark energy is inferred from the rush of galaxies away from each other — it's like trying to guess the instruments of an orchestra through a closed door. You hear the rhythm, but not the timbre. Now, physicists propose to 'open the door' using the Large Hadron Collider. There, we can produce fleeting particles that lie beyond the Standard Model (the core theory of the microworld). Their decay patterns depend on the speed of sound in the dark energy medium: it's as if the tonality shifts.

In this way, proton collisions help us 'hear' the timbre of the force driving the cosmos apart, and pick the correct theory from many — much like tuning a radio to the right frequency.