Question: What advances are being made at CERN right now?

Kristian Harder answered on 8 Nov 2013:

Actually, this year and next year all particle accelerators at CERN are switched off for maintenance and improvements. This means we are not actually collecting new data to look at. BUT we are still busy looking at every detail of the data recorded over the past few years. These experiments are very complex, and the interesting things we are looking for are very difficult to identify in the huge amount of data we recorded, and therefore it can take years of work for results to become available. I think the most interesting thing seen in the data is currently the Higgs boson. When it was discovered, we only knew little about it – not even that it really was a Higgs boson. Now we know that it definitely is one, and we are beginning to study its properties in more detail. This may not sound as exciting as finding a new particle in the first place, but it is absolutely necessary to do this in order to understand what role this particle plays, and which of the many versions of our concept of how the universe works it fits in best.
But ok, that’s the particle physics side of the answer. The engineering side of it is that people are working very hard right now to almost *double* the energy of the LHC beams. That means that once we switch it all back on, it’s going to be really exciting again, because we’ll step into uncharted territory yet again. Let’s see what awaits us this time. 🙂