Particle physics after the Higgs boson discovery: opportunities for the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The first run of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN brought the discovery of the Higgs boson, an apparently elementary scalar particle with a mass of 125 GeV, the avatar of the mechanism that hides the electroweak symmetry. A new round of experimentation is beginning, with the energy of the proton-proton colliding beams raised to 6.5 TeV per beam, from 4 TeV at the end of the first run. This article summarizes what we have learned about the Higgs boson, and calls attention to some issues that will be among our central concerns in the near future.