Ten years on from the Higgs boson, what is next for physics?

“I was actually shaking,” said Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College, London, as he describes the moment he saw the results. “I realised this was probably the most exciting thing I’ve done in my 20 years in particle physics.”

Dr Patel is one of the leaders of lhcb, an experiment at cern, in Geneva. cern is the world’s largest particle-physics laboratory, and the “lhc” bit of the experiment’s name stands for “Large Hadron Collider”, which is likewise the world’s biggest particle accelerator. This machine, which collides packets of high-speed protons (examples of a type of subatomic particle called a hadron) was switched on again on July 5th, after a three-and-a-half-year upgrade, for what is known as “Run 3”. In the interim Dr Patel and his colleagues have been crunching data collected from previous runs. It is the results of these crunchings that are giving him palpitations.