Physicists polish one model while looking to the next

High-energy physicists' current explanation for the behavior of subatomic particles and forces, known as the Standard Model, is doing just fine. That was the take-home message for the 800 delegates who gathered here from 27 July to 2 August for the international Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics. open-quotes Mainly this was a conference of consolidation, steady progress, many very beautiful and detailed results,close quotes Christopher Llewellyn Smith, director general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, told Science. But while a multitude of presentations described ever more accurate tests and confirmations of the model, physicists also discussed hints that a whole new range of phenomena beyond the Standard Model is lurking just above the energies of current accelerators-and within range of the next generation of experiments. Other topics covered in this meeting report include the practical side of detecting and recording events in future particle accelerators and some new information on the elusive neutrino