We tend to only pay attention to particle physics when scientists announce that they've found something new. But those discoveries would never get to the announcement stage without the years of grunt work needed to control particles at extremely high energies and record the debris that spews into detectors when those particles collide. This work doesn't get talked about much because it simply sets the stage for discovery rather than containing obvious "eureka!" moments.

The people behind CERN's Large Hadron Collider are in the process of setting a phenomenal stage.

Last year's run was all about taking the LHC to higher energies, which would enable the discovery of heavier particles and make it easier to spot light ones. This year's run was about taking the experience gained last year and using it to produce lots more collisions. So far, everything is going according to plan.

Physicists, being somewhat odd, measure the number of collisions in units called "inverse femtobarns" (which is, obviously, 1/10-15 barns). Last year, in a run that went from July into November, the LHC delivered over four inverse femtobarns of collisions to the detectors (of which the CMS detector recorded just under four). Because of last year's experience, data gathering started in May this year and went into overdrive in June. As a result, the detector has now recorded over 10 inverse femtobarns of collisions, and the run still has several months to go.

You can compare the graph at top with this one from last year.

This will leave researchers with a phenomenal amount of data, which they'll use to do three things. One is obviously to search for new particles. There was a hint of something in last year's data, but the statistical significance was low. It's safe to assume that with three times the data, an analysis performed today would give this hint a far more definitive thumbs up or down. (Rumors suggest it's thumbs down).

The second thing is to conclusively show that some predicted particles don't exist. There are many theoretical models that suggest particles with specific properties for which the data can be checked. If there's enough data, the possibility that those hypothetical particles actually exist can be eliminated with high statistical certainty. That would mean the models that predicted the particles are wrong in significant ways.

The final thing that the data provides is copious numbers of particles we already knew existed but don't understand well. Obviously, this would include the Higgs boson, which has only ever been clearly detected at the LHC. By observing many of its decays, researchers will be able to get a better handle on its properties. The same goes for several agglomerations of quarks that contain four or five of these fundamental particles (most matter we're familiar with contains only three). We're now pretty certain these exist, but their precise nature has been debatable.

The first results from all this new data (possibly combined with that from earlier LHC runs) will probably be discussed at meetings later this summer. But the analysis will go on for years, even as more data is added to the growing pile—so surprises could crop up at any time.