It's the sort of thing that keeps particle hunters up at night. What if the Large Hadron Collider only turns up the Higgs boson and nothing else? That nightmare would leave the hunt for new physics at a dead end - a fate that could perhaps be avoided if the LHC hung onto more of its data.
Physicists celebrate even tentative signs of the Higgs (see "Still on the run"). Thought to give all other particles mass, the Higgs is the last undiscovered particle in the standard model, our most successful theory for how particles and forces interact.
The trouble is the standard model is incomplete, since it has nothing to say about gravity or dark matter. Unfortunately, no new particles have been found that might point the way to a more powerful theory (see "11 particles for 11 physics puzzles"). "It could be the situation a year from now that nothing will be found at the LHC other than the Higgs," says Tomer Volansky of Tel Aviv University in Israel. "In that situation, we won't really know what to do next."
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