Here is the following for particle physics

September 10 marked the tenth anniversary of the first power-up of the Large Hadron Collider. As he has already achieved his best-known goal of discovering the Higgs boson, you may be wondering what's happening at the famous collider.

The Large Hadron Collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest scientific apparatus in the world. It is a pair of 16-mile superconducting magnet rings that accelerate the high-energy particle regimes (usually protons, sometimes whole atomic nuclei) and strike them inside the size of a building. The most remarkable achievement of the LHC was the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by the standard model, the model of particle physics. Scientists have since worked on what comes next.

It is true that researchers have not discovered a new fundamental particle since the Higgs boson. In fact, what they did in large part is excluded from the possibilities of new particles. That's what a lot of particle physics consists of these days: understanding all types of particles do not exist in the hope of finding something new, like throwing all Cracker Jacks in a bag hoping to find a price inside. Some of the most likely contenders for new particles have been excluded; supersymmetry, the idea that each particle has an unknown partner, continues to be discovered. More about it here and here.

Some consider the current state of particle physics with rather bleak perspectives, but that's not the way the young physicists I talk to usually feel. "Since we did not find anything immediate, it may suggest that our universe is strange," said James Beacham, particle physicist at ATLAS Experiment, Gizmodo last year. "The goal is to convince our associates, especially the physicists of the old school, that we need to change our minds. We are no longer hunters of Higgs or supersymmetry. We are cartographers.

After all, there are a lot of important physical mysteries. Gravity does not play well, mathematically, with the behavior of the smaller particles. The mass of Higgs has elicited as many questions as answers about how the universe works and scientists continue to learn new things about the particle. And many physicists believe that most of the mass of the universe exists in the form of a strange particle, yet to be discovered, called dark matter – although others do not. Maybe the LHC could prove or disprove the existence of a dark matter particle.

Physicists like Beacham think that since the construction of the LHC in thinking of the Higgs boson, it is time to expand our thinking now that it has been discovered. There are ideas for placing detectors tens of meters away from LHC collision points to potentially capture particles that travel a long distance before becoming observable. Physicists also examine data that is generally ignored with fresh eyes.

And there is a lot more data to watch. "Since 2012, each of the experiments has published about 600 scientific articles, many of which were studying the new Higgs," said Freya Blekman, a physicist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in a direct message on Twitter. "And those 700 + total papers are just with the top 3 percent of the data we plan to take up at the end of the LHC :)"

There are several ongoing efforts to position the LHC so that it looks at these new ideas as best as possible. The LHC is about to receive an upgrade that will see five to seven times more collisions per second. Observing more collisions means collecting more data more quickly and giving physicists a better view of things that can happen incredibly rarely.

Accelerator physicists are experimenting even more with innovations. Recently, scientists have put atoms containing electrons in the machine for the first time. This experiment was actually a proof of concept for a future device that would produce the most powerful gamma rays for basic physics research. Another CERN team has recently created an electron accelerator of a fraction of the size of other electron accelerators.

There are also tempting tracks. One of the LHC's ring detectors, called LHCb, has observed anomalies in the rate at which a particle called B⁰ decadence – implying the existence of undiscovered particles – although follow-up research is still ongoing.

CERN hosts a series of other experiments designed to illuminate the various attributes of matter, those that use accelerated particles to study atomic nuclei, antimatter and even the environment. The LHC has an entire program devoted to the collision of whole atomic nuclei to understand the nature of quarks – the particles that make up protons and neutrons – and how they interact with each other.

In other words, you could hear a story that did not last much at the Large Hadron Collider since the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. That's far from the case but you have to wonder what to do with a whole universe of mysteries. is stressful and takes time.

"Progress is constant, but it often takes 10 or 20 years to go from one major breakthrough to another," said Joel Butler, a Fermilab scientist and former spokesman for the LHC's CMS detector. "There are a lot of false leads and dead ends that you have to explore before finding the right path."

This article has been updated with a quote from Freya Blekman.