It is a remarkable fact that we do not know what the vast majority of the Universe is made of. Everything we can see, planets, stars, galaxies and gas, makes up just a tiny fraction of the matter in the Universe. The rest, invisible to us, was dubbed ‘dark matter‘ by Fritz Zwicky, the maverick but brilliant astronomer, rocket scientist and humanitarian, who inferred its existence when trying to reconcile the motions of galaxies with the laws of gravity. A vast array of more recent astronomical observations, probing the Universe at many different scales and wavelengths, all point to the same conclusion. Now, some 80 years later, dark matter, and its partner dark energy, are the pervasive dogma of cosmology. At the other extreme of scale, we have a similar mystery, in that Nature has presented us with a range of particles with a great range of properties, yet we know little of why there should be such diversity. The theory of supersymmetry may provide some of the answers.  One of its most robust predictions is that of a new fundamental particle, produced in abundance in the aftermath of the big bang, and which it will be hard, but not quite impossible to detect. It is not surprising therefore that the search for these elusive particles, with the fundamental impact across both physics and astronomy that its detection would bring, has become one of the most prized of all goals in science...