So about a year ago, physicists at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson (or more technically, a “Higgs-like particle” that has now been confirmed to be the Higgs) in the LHC. And you probably haven’t heard much about the collider since then. Part of that is because the the discovery (or non-discovery) of the Higgs at the energies the LHC was probing at was one of the biggest tests of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which was one of the major selling points of building the LHC in the first place. And since February of this year, the LHC has been shut down to allow for technical improvements that will turn it into an even more energetic detector (and in particle physics, the more energetic you are, the more you can see). If you’re really tuned into CERN, you may know that in November of last year, researchers announced observations of a rare kind of meson decay into muons (which are like heavier electrons).
But part of the reason also seems to be that the results from before the shutdown don’t give physicists much new to theorize on. The Higgs boson was discovered to have the mass predicted by the Standard Model, and so served as a great test of that. But that also means it doesn’t really offer anything new for theorists. And though the muon decay hasn’t been verified yet to the statistical significance that particle physicists consider to mean a discovery, what has been found so far still fits into the Standard Model. Neither of these findings fit into most of the common models of supersymmetry, which is believed to be a necessary component of string theory, which is currently the dominant idea to go beyond the Standard Model to a “theory of everything”.

The stakes for various new physics that researchers hope to find at the LHC.