As the year draws to a close, it is time to take a look at the most exciting, important, and revolutionary tech breakthroughs of 2012.

If you’re a reader of ExtremeTech, you will already know that 2012 has been a bumper year for bleeding-edge tech, from Curiosity touching down on Mars, to the discovery of the Higgs boson by CERN, to the first commercially viable electronic-photonic integrated chips, amongst other exciting breakthroughs. At this point though, we shouldn’t really be surprised. Technology is a force amplifier that feeds back into itself, allowing us to push past the envelope of contemporary science at an exponential rate.

Let’s dive straight in with the biggest, though not necessarily the best, breakthrough of 2012.

Higgs boson

In terms of the biggest discovery, 2012 will go down as the year that particle physicists finally found the Higgs boson particle — or at least a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson theorized by the Standard Model. The Higgs (see: What is the Higgs boson, and why is it important to science?) was discovered in July, and over the last six months the ATLAS and CMS teams at CERN have been further cementing their discovery — they’re now 99.999999999% sure that they’ve found a Higgs-like particle.

While particle physicists are understandably glad that the Higgs boson has been discovered, the scientific community is a little bit disappointed that, so far, it seems to be behaving exactly as expected. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but CERN had kind of hoped that there’d be some new, unpredicted facet of the Higgs that could be explored. You see, the discovery of the Higgs yet again reinforces the veracity of the Standard Model of particle physics — and that’s a problem, because the Model still can’t explain dark energy, dark matter, or gravity.

And so the search for other, more exotic particles continues — but considering the LHC is shutting down for upgrades and won’t be back online until 2015, we may have to wait a while for another significant discovery. If you haven’t already, check out our Higgs boson explainer (or watch the video below).

The next breakthrough: Electronic-photonic chips