Hunt Beyond Higgs...

View of the main solenoid of the CMS detector at CERN: is new physics lurking in the vast amounts of data acquired by the experiment? (Courtesy: CERN/Samuel Morier-Genoud)

After discovering the Higgs boson last year, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are now trawling through the data as the collider undergoes an 18-month shutdown for repairs and upgrades. The goal is to discover hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics – but tantalizing glimpses of new physics have been harder to spot than many physicists had expected.

But while the public has largely taken the discovery of the Higgs boson as mission accomplished for the €3.8bn collider, many particle physicists have been shaking their heads in disappointment. Since it started collecting data, the LHC has exposed few – if any – traces of physics beyond the Standard Model, a framework that is now some 40 years old. There has been no solid evidence for dark matter, supersymmetry, miniature black holes, extra dimensions or any of the other exotic phenomena that theorists excitedly talked about prior to the machine's switch-on. If there is new physics still waiting to be found, the question is: where? And will it turn up in the current shutdown period from an analysis of existing data or in the next, higher energy run?

Physics World: Higgs hunters look beyond the Standard Model