SO WE'VE finally found it. Or have we? Four months on, the identity of the particle snared at the Large Hadron Collider remains unclear.
It may indeed be the much-vaunted Higgs boson. Or it might not. Finding out will require a welter of tests hard to do in the messy environment of the LHC's proton collisions (see "Particle headache: Why the Higgs could spell disaster").
What's needed is... wait for it... a successor to the LHC. Physicists have already started dreaming of another huge particle smasher, this time based on electrons, to finally pin down the Higgs.
In these straitened times that won't be an easy sell, especially as the LHC still feels so shiny and new. But a successor was always part of the long-term plan and will eventually be needed to make more progress. Whatever the LHC found, the public was captivated. Now is a good time for physicists to start - subtly - making their case.
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