When particle physicists around the world woke up on 5 July, the scenes of joy, relief and tears were still fresh in their minds — along with a huge unanswered question. The memories were of celebrations the previous day, when researchers announced that a new particle very much like the long-sought Higgs boson had at last been found in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva in Switzerland. The question promised to define their discipline's whole future. Is the particle a Higgs boson of maximum simplicity, as predicted by the 40-year-old standard model of particle physics? Or is it something more complex and interesting that will point towards a deeper, more complete theory?
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