The s and s in nuclei, like the electrons surrounding the nuclei, can be excited to states of higher energy or... fall back to a state of lower energ… - Steven Weinberg

It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.

In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?

There is a hope, which I nurse but I don't see being realized, that eventually we'll find that quantum mechanics as we know it now is just an approximation ...