From gravity to the Higgs we're still waiting for new physics

Annual physics jamboree Rencontres de Moriond has a history of revealing exciting results from colliders, and this year new theories and evidence abound

I'm here again at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy. Some of you might remember an update from last year from the same conference on a signal in data taken during 2015 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), hinting at a new particle that weighed as much as 750 protons and decayed into two particles of light. This signal wasn't present in fresh data last year, so it was dismissed - we suppose that it was just a chance fluctuation.

This conference has a history of releasing some exciting experimental results from colliders, so I've been eagerly awaiting the experimental analyses of the searches for new physics. While there are - disappointingly - no significant direct signals of new particles from the collisions, evidence is mounting in the decays of some composite particles that have bottom quarks stuck together with another quark (or anti-quark): "bottom mesons".