Particle physicists are the divas of the scientific world. At the Hadron Collider Physics symposium in Japan, CERN researchers have reported the latest Higgs boson-related findings from the LHC — and, much to their chagrin, that pesky little God particle is behaving exactly as expected. You’d think they’d be happy that the Standard Model of particle physics remains in tact, but no.

Since the Higgs boson was discovered in July, the CMS and ATLAS detector teams at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have been running a barrage of tests to suss out whether the Higgs behaves exactly as the Standard Model predicts — and though it isn’t completely confirmed, it seems that is indeed the case.

The Standard Model is a theory that postulates that the universe is built from a handful of fundamental, elementary particles — quarks, gluons, bosons, photons, and so on — and the forces between those particles. The current Standard Model has been in place since the ’70s, and despite the discovery of some quarks, a neutrino, and now the Higgs boson — the particle that provides every other particle with mass — the Model has remained unscathed. With the Higgs boson now in place, every particle in the Standard Model has been discovered, and found to behave as expected.

This is a problem, because it further reinforces the veracity of the Standard Model — and yet the Standard Model doesn’t explain dark matter, dark energy, or gravity. Basically, the scientists at CERN were hoping that the Higgs boson would decay into some interesting new particles, or behave in an odd way that would somehow explain dark matter or gravity — but alas, that isn’t the case. Further adding to their frustration, the LHC has also been carrying out other experiments to search for other particles — charginos, squarks — that might explain these “beyond the Standard Model” theories, but again they have found nothing.

But hey, it’s not the end of the world — it’s just science. “The results really tell us that we’re either not looking in the right place, or we’re not looking in the right way, or maybe both,” Paul Jackson of the ATLAS team says to New Scientist. Physicists might be disappointed that the universe hasn’t simply rolled over and coughed up its innermost secrets — but if anyone knows how slow and maddeningly riddled with pitfalls the road to science is, it’s physicists.

Moving forward, one avenue of investigation is that the Higgs boson seems to break down into pairs of photons twice as often as predicted. No one quite knows what this means, but one possible answer is that the Higgs boson is a composite particle, rather than an elementary particle. Both the CMS and ATLAS detectors are running more tests to see what’s up with this diphoton decay (yes, diphoton is really a word).

Now read: What is the Higgs boson and why is it important to science?