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Higgs boson hunt – finding the so-called God particle has been a major goal for the £10bn Large Hadron Collder. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Higgs boson hunt – finding the so-called God particle has been a major goal for the £10bn Large Hadron Collder. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Higgs boson: scientists close in on 'God particle'

This article is more than 12 years old
Discovery would rank among most important scientific advances in 100 years and confirm how elementary particles get mass

Scientists are expected to announce they may have caught their first glimpse of the Higgs boson, a curious subatomic particle long thought to underpin the microscopic workings of nature.

Hundreds of physicists will crowd into a seminar room at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, on Tuesday, to hear the latest in the hunt for the particle, while thousands more are expected to watch online.

The Higgs boson, or so-called God particle, has become the most coveted prize in particle physics since it was postulated in the mid-1960s. Its discovery would rank among the most important scientific advances of the past 100 years and confirm how elementary particles get mass.

Scientists have been hunting the Higgs for more than 30 years with machines so large they are miles across and consume the power of a reasonable-sized town. While the results are unlikely to be conclusive – the hints of the particle could fade when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collects more data next year – they are understood to be the strongest evidence so far that the Higgs particle is there to be found.

Finding the Higgs boson has been a major goal for the £10bn LHC after a less powerful machine at Cern, the LEP, failed to find the missing particle before it was shut down in 2000. The hunt was joined by scientists at the Tevatron collider near Chicago, who will present their results early next year.

The Higgs boson is the signature particle of a theory published by six physicists within a few months of each other in 1964. Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University was the first to point out the theory called for the existence of the unusual, missing particle.

According to the theory, an invisible energy field fills the vacuum of space throughout the universe. When some particles move through the field they feel drag and gain weight as a result. Others, like particles of light, or photons, feel no drag at all and remain massless.

Without the field – or something to do its job – all fundamental particles would weigh nothing and hurtle around at the speed of light. That would spell disaster for the formation of familiar atoms in the early universe and rule out life as we know it.

While the field is thought to give mass to fundamental particles, including quarks and electrons (the particles that make up atoms) it accounts for only 1% or 2% of the weight of an atom itself, or any everyday object. That is because most mass comes from the energy that glues quarks together inside atoms.

To hunt for the Higgs boson, physicists at the LHC sift through showers of subatomic debris that spew out when protons collide in the machine at close to the speed of light. Most of the energy released in these microscopic fireballs is converted into well-known particles that are identified by the collider's giant detectors.

Occasionally, the collisions might create a Higgs boson, but it disintegrates immediately into more familiar particles. To find it, scientists must look for telltale "excesses" of particles that signify Higgs boson decays. They appear as bumps, or peaks, in the data.

If the rumoured glimpse of the Higgs boson turns into a formal sighting next year, it may be one of several Higgs particles outlined in a radical, but much studied theory of nature called supersymmetry. The theory, that every known type of particle has an undiscovered twin, is popular among many physicists because it explains how some forces of nature might have behaved as one in the early universe. Unifying the forces of nature was a feat that eluded Albert Einstein.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Higgs boson: Cern scientists may have glimpsed 'God particle' - video

  • We may have glimpsed the Higgs boson, say Cern scientists

  • Why one Higgs boson will not be enough

  • Higgs boson seminar: have physicists found the 'God particle'?

  • What is the Higgs boson?

  • Whether we find the Higgs Boson or not, particle physics is a benefit to us all

  • Science Weekly
    Science Weekly podcast: An accelerated guide to the Higgs boson

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