LHC discovered the first known scalar particle, and the linchpin to the mass-generation mechanism of the Standard Model.
Yes, it turned out where other experiments had begun to hint that it might be, but I can state from personal professional experience that, prior to LHC, nobody really knew what to expect. Furthermore, most of those experiments were done after LHC began construction.
I would have bet on a single low-mass Higgs, had I been asked, only because it was the Standard Model prediction, but I would not have bet very much. I think most people expected something Higgs-like, but slightly different. I think everyone is surprised that there have been no surprises (hence this very article).
The very absence of surprises is perhaps the most important result from LHC. There were lots of good reasons to expect new stuff at a few TeV, and for some reason, those reasons just weren't good enough.
Viewed another way, if we hadn't built LHC, physicists would have continued to clamor to build something very akin to LHC until something LHC-like was built. It represented the most effort- and cost-efficient approach to the best predictions we could muster!
A collider, probably lepton/anti-lepton, that sits on the Higgs resonance is the clear next step, now that the Higgs mass is known, just as it has been since the "discovery machine" LHC was proposed.
Yes, it turned out where other experiments had begun to hint that it might be, but I can state from personal professional experience that, prior to LHC, nobody really knew what to expect. Furthermore, most of those experiments were done after LHC began construction.
I would have bet on a single low-mass Higgs, had I been asked, only because it was the Standard Model prediction, but I would not have bet very much. I think most people expected something Higgs-like, but slightly different. I think everyone is surprised that there have been no surprises (hence this very article).
The very absence of surprises is perhaps the most important result from LHC. There were lots of good reasons to expect new stuff at a few TeV, and for some reason, those reasons just weren't good enough.
Viewed another way, if we hadn't built LHC, physicists would have continued to clamor to build something very akin to LHC until something LHC-like was built. It represented the most effort- and cost-efficient approach to the best predictions we could muster!
A collider, probably lepton/anti-lepton, that sits on the Higgs resonance is the clear next step, now that the Higgs mass is known, just as it has been since the "discovery machine" LHC was proposed.