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In 2012, the science world broke into celebration with the announcement that the Higgs boson - sometimes controversially referred to as the 'God particle' - had been found.

The discovery of the particle, which is believed to give mass to matter, was a crowning achievement and justification for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern.

But one scientist has told MailOnline we can expect even greater discoveries from the collider in the coming years - and one in particular could be the most important in history.

Dr Monica Dunford worked at Cern in Switzerland up until 2013 and was directly involved in the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012. Cern's collider (part shown) is buried in a tunnel 27km (17 miles) long straddling the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains

Dr Monica Dunford, originally from California and now a researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, worked at Cern in Switzerland until 2013.

She is one of six scientists who feature in the widely acclaimed documentary Particle Fever, which chronicles the first round of experiments at the LHC at Cern in 2008, leading up to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Finding the Higgs boson was one of the primary goals of the LHC - but perhaps the LHC's most important moment is yet to come.

'One of the things I'm most interested in is creating and discovering dark matter,' Dr Dunford said.

'We know from measurements of cosmology that 25 per cent of the universe is dark matter and we have absolutely no idea what that is.

'For comparison, what we do know, electrons and protons, only count for four per cent.

'You have this huge chunk of a pie and no idea what it consists of.

'One thing we could possibly produce would be a dark matter candidate via its decay products.

'Being able to produce it at the LHC would be a huge connection between our astronomical measurements and what we can produce in the laboratory.'

'One of the things I'm most interested in is creating and discovering dark matter,' Dr Dunford said. 'We know from measurements of cosmology that 25 per cent of the universe is dark matter and we have absolutely no idea what that is.' An illustration of dark matter in the universe is shown

On whether it would be the LHC's most important discovery to date, she said: 'Personally yes. It would be a bigger discovery than the Higgs boson.

'For the Higgs we had a very good concrete theoretical prediction; for dark matter we really have no idea what it would be.'

She added: 'There is no particle that we know of today that can explain dark matter, let alone what dark energy might be.

'So if we could directly produce dark matter particles at the LHC this would be a huge step forward in our understanding of the composition of the universe!'

Dr Monica Dunford (pictured), originally from California and now a researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, worked at Cern in Switzerland until 2013. She is one of six scientists who feature in the widely acclaimed documentary, which chronicles the moments leading up to the discovery of the Higgs

If the LHC does one day find dark matter, it will be interesting to see if the moments leading up to it are as tense as those before the Higgs boson was found.

Dr Dunford first came to Cern in 2006, when she was involved in the initial construction and development of the world's largest particle accelerator.

'In the beginning we were building the detector,' she said.

'It was awesome, total stress, but it was great. We were probably a core team of several hundred in the day and night.'

After that initial period, the teams moved onto the 'much less sexy' tasks of data analysis from the detector.

'In the beginning, before the Higgs boson was discovered, there was a lot of tension,' Dr Dunford continues.

'We would have these blocks of data and people would be like "is it there? Can we see it?"

'At the time the announcement was made in 2012, it had risen to a fever pitch.

'I don't think there will be another time like that in my career for sure.'

That discovery was not only a groundbreaking moment for physics, but also justified the huge cost £5.9 billion ($9.1 billion) of building and operating the LHC.

Finding the Higgs boson was one of the primary goals of the LHC, so the moments leading up to its discovery were understandably tense. Illustrated is one of the proton-proton collisions measured in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment in the search for the Higgs boson

However, at the time some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, had actually been championing the non-discovery of the particle.

In 2013 he was quoted as saying it would have been 'far more interesting' if it hadn't been found, as it would have allowed for new theories of the universe to be formulated.

And Dr Dunford agrees that it could have been just as interesting had the Higgs not been found.

'Nature is what nature is,' she said. 'We're trying to unlock its secrets.

'We believed the Higgs was there, but if nature had something different in mind, all the better. We would have to go back to the drawing board.

'It wouldn't have been a failure, it would have been equally exciting to not see anything, but more work for my theory colleagues.'

The existence of the Higgs boson was put forward in the 1960s by British physicist Dr Peter Higgs (pictured) to explain why the tiny particles that make up atoms have mass. It has been described as the 'missing piece' of the Standard Model, which explains how the parts of the universe that we understand interact

Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking (pictured), had actually been championing the non-discovery of the Higgs boson. In 2013 he was quoted as saying it would have been 'far more interesting' if it hadn't been found, as it would have allowed for new theories of the universe to be formulated

The chances of finding dark matter at the LHC, though, are unknown at the moment.

Many theories predict its existence, particularly within the Standard Model of physics, but if it can't be found it may require an even greater machine that the LHC.

Next year it will double the energy of the two proton beams it collides to 13TeV (teraelectronvolts), an energy never achieved by an accelerator before.

Dr Dunford says this will give it 'a lot of potential' to find new particles - possibly dark matter - or even other particles not in our current understanding of nature.

Whatever the future holds for the LHC, the project so far is a testament to what can be achieved through international cooperation.

'One of the things people don't appreciate about Cern is it's an incredibly international organisation, all achieving the same goals,' Dr Dunford adds.

'I hope a lot of the media attention inspires people to realise why fundamental physics is important.'