The CMS Collaboration has just released their latest, most comprehensive results ever. There is no indication of physics beyond the Standard Model in the results. Image credit: CERN/Maximlien Brice, of the CMS detector, the small detector at the LHC.

LHC’s latest results: victory for the Standard Model!

And defeat for new physics. Without something spectacular, there’s no reason to build a bigger collider.

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” -Lord Kelvin (misattributed)

Back in the 1990s and the 2000s, the United States was the energy leader in high-energy physics. By accelerating protons and antiprotons to collide at 2 TeV of combined energy — at speeds of 99.999956% the speed of light — a whole slew of never-before-seen particles were discovered, including all the quarks and leptons of the Standard Model. At increased energies, currently up to 13 TeV and speeds of 99.9999991% the speed of light, proton-proton collisions at the LHC took us even further, revealing the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle of the Standard Model. With its discovery earlier this decade at CERN, the Standard Model was complete. But if it can’t find anything novel and unexpected, it might be the last collider to ever make a major discovery. The latest search results at these high energies were just released by the CMS collaboration, and if you’re a fan of new, beyond-the-Standard-Model physics, the news isn’t good. In fact, it highlights a very real problem with fundamental physics that physicists don’t really like to talk about.