Abstract

On July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced the historic discovery of a Higgs boson at the CERN laboratory’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A remarkable century exploring Nature’s sub-atomic constituents led to the Standard Model of particle physics, with the Higgs as the last missing piece. How do we know the theory is correct? In this talk I will present a brief history of particles and explain why smashing them together at the record-breaking energies of the LHC guaranteed we would find something, whether it was the Higgs particle or something else. No such guarantees exists for future discoveries. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to expect fundamentally new physics beyond the Standard Model. I will describe these motivations and the current state of searches, including a possible hint an unexpected particle in the latest results from CERN .