What are the most promising areas in physics?

Question

Particle physics is going out of fashion due to the need of bigger accelerators and a lack of progress.Superconductors were trending for a few weeks before reality sank in.There are rumors of advancements on nuclear fusion.The deployment of the James Webb Telescope is improving our knowledge in cosmology and astronomy.In your opinion, what might be the most promising fields in physics for the upcoming 5 to 10 years?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

I think the big theme around Webb is that certain events seem to have happened much more quickly in the early universe than we can explain. It's at the point that it is a crisis in astronomy and not just an "improvement in knowledge".
For a long time it has been a big mystery how the supermassive black holes formed at galactic centers, it is not clear at all how they got so big so fast.
In recent observations it seems that many other processes happened much more quickly than we expected so either we're going to understand how things happened so fast or maybe what we think was the first billion years of the universe was really the first ten billion years or something.
Related to that, Webb is likely to reveal evidence for Population 3 stars that formed from gas that was ultra-low in "metal" content (astronomers call anything heavier than helium a "metal") and also where the gas clouds were warmer than gas clouds that form stars now. Such stars likely formed very fast and got huge and Webb is likely to see them
https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/ESSAYS/Carr/carr.html
The other big mystery in particle physics which might be the key to the other mysteries is the nature of the neutrino mass. The nature of the mass term of the neutrino is still unknown in the standard model (it's a "missing piece" not "physics beyond the standard model") and there is the mystery that unlike every other particle we only see left handed neutrinos
https://cerncourier.com/a/turning-the-screw-on-right-handed-...
It is possible that there are right handed neutrinos we can't see, and if there aren't, there is still something weird about neutrinos because they would have to be their own antiparticles. Right handed neutrinos could explain dark matter and the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, see
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.6912.pdf
I'm not sure if we will "crack the case" of the neutrino mass in the near future of all the alleged mysteries in physics this is clearly a missing puzzle piece whereas other things like sparticles and axions are more of a solution looking for a problem.