The world's favourite particle is proving far too well-behaved for physicists' liking. The first major update from the Large Hadron Collider since a particle resembling the Higgs boson was discovered in July rules out one way in which the boson might open the door to new physics, and weakens another.
What's more, direct searches for particles not accounted for in the standard model of particle physics, our leading theory of the fundamental particles and forces, are also coming up empty. "I would, as a hunter of new physics, have liked to see it different than what we have now," says Albert De Roeck of CMS, one of the two major detectors at the LHC, which is based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. "But the data is the data."
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