In 2012, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland famously found a particle that acted like the Higgs boson, an elusive and long-theorized particle that imbues mass to matter. Usha Mallik, a University of Iowa physicist, thinks that they might have caught an "impostor" masquerading as the Higgs, and that it's possible we still haven't found the real Higgs boson at all. In a new experiment, her team is pushing the LHC to an all-time high of 14 TeV (a unit of energy) from the previous record of 13 TeV, in order to seek out two "bottom quarks"—subatomic particles that should be left behind when a Higgs boson particle decays. It's thought that these bottom quarks are created about 60 percent of the time a Higgs boson vanishes, yet this particular pattern has never been observed before.

 

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