[Reblog]: After the Higgs: The new particle landscape

Physicists are planning the powerful accelerators they will need to study the Higgs boson and its interactions in detail.

• Matthew Chalmers

29 August 2012

ILLUSTRATION BY BRENDAN MONROE

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?

Physicists hope and expect that the LHC will give them some answers over the next few years. But they are already honing their sales pitches for a machine to follow the LHC — a ‘Higgs factory’ that would illuminate such a theory with measurements far more precise than the LHC can provide… (continua su nature.com)