The Higgs boson is a massive particle that holds the key to explaining how other elementary particles acquire mass.. This discovery confirmed the prediction of 45 years ago and proved the correctness of the so-called Standard Model..

And then - nothing. Physicists are worried that the LHC is only capable of producing Higgs bosons, giving no idea of \u200b\u200bwhat lies beyond the standard model, Science writes.. “It's a bit disappointing,” admits Caltech physicist Barry Barish, “I thought we'd discover supersymmetry, which would push the boundaries of the Standard Model..

[see_also ids\u003d"

Too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of modernization, the LHC is currently launching for the third of five planned launches, and in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second, some new particle could be born.. In fact, the LHC should work for another 16 years and, with further upgrades, should collect 16 times more data than it already has.. All this data can reveal subtle signs of new particles and phenomena..

However, some researchers say the physics of the collider is on the verge of collapse.. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Kollar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who is looking for dark matter.. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long and uncertain road to discovery..

Since the 1970s, physicists have been trying to go beyond the Standard Model.. It consistently describes everything that scientists have observed so far in particle accelerators.. However, it cannot be the ultimate " The Standard Model does not explain the nature of gravity and does not suggest the existence of a mysterious dark matter that outweighs ordinary matter in the universe by six times..

The LHC had to get out of this impasse. In its ring, protons circulating in opposite directions collide with each other at nearly seven times the energy of any previous collider, allowing the LHC to produce very massive particles.. A decade ago, many physicists thought they would quickly discover miracles, including new force-carrying particles or even mini black holes.. But the Higgs boson did not hope to be discovered so quickly.

Instead, the Higgs boson appeared in a relatively short 3 years.. But, 10 years after this monumental discovery, not a single new particle has appeared..

Only - tantalizing anomalies, small discrepancies between observations and predictions of the Standard Model.

The Large Hadron Collider, abbreviated as LHC, is a colliding particle accelerator designed to accelerate protons and heavy ions and study the products of their collisions.. The collider is built at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), located near Geneva, on the border of Switzerland and France.. LHC is the largest experimental facility in the world. Its diameter is about 27 km.