Physicists polish one model while looking to the next.
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM-High-energy physicists' current explanation for the behavior of subatomic particles and forces, known as the Standard Model, is doing just fine. That was the take-home message for the 800 delegates who gathered here from 27 July to 2 August for the International Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics. "Mainly this was a conference of consolidation, steady progress, many very beautiful and detailed results," Christopher Llewellyn Smith, director general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, told Science. But while a multitude of presentations described ever more accurate tests and confirmations of the model, physicists also discussed hints that a whole new range of phenomena beyond the Standard Model is lurking just above the energies of current accelerators-and within range of the next generation of experiments.
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