Update from the energy frontier: A preview of the annual report from CERN

What will we learn from the past year of higher-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider?

It is that time again at CERN, the multinational laboratory in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's largest particle accelerator. Every December there is an annual report of the physics results from the laboratory over the preceding year. These reports vary in the level of excitement they engender. How exciting might it be this year?

Although the LHC is not the only machine at CERN, it has dominated the programme for the past few years. In December 2011 we had the first real hints of the Higgs boson. By December 2012, these hints had turned into a discovery. In 2013 and 2014 there were no new collisions at the LHC, but there was a lot of progress to report in understanding the data taken in 2011 and 2012. In 2015, collisions began again, at even higher energies, and the report is on Tuesday 15 December.