That's just how particle physics research works. You build a detector that is designed to detect things with specific properties. You run the detector. Did you

That's just how particle physics research works. You build a detector that is designed to detect things with specific properties. You run the detector. Did you find the thing? If so, great, if not, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. Either way you write a paper and you build the next detector. The Higgs boson has numerous experiments exclude numerous mass ranges excluded before it was finally found. > At what point do we decide that enough has been ruled out to start looking elsewhere? "We" don't make that decision. The various institutions who pay for these things decide, one by one, that they're going to fund some thing that sounds more promising instead. It does kinda suck that there's something there in the universe that is perniciously difficult to see--in fact, that's how it's defined--but that is so important in the way the universe works that we can't simply ignore it. But this is the universe we're given, so this is the universe we'll run experiments on.